I have taken the plunge and started my self-guided exploration of Ruby and the Rails framework. 
I was happy to discover that Ruby, Rails2.0, Mongrel, sqlite3, and subversion is already integrated into Leopard. Then I discovered that all of the published tutorials are based around Rails 1.2! There is virtually no tutorial information out there on Rails 2.0 aside from a few screen-casts going over some of the new features. Consequently, I downloaded and installed Locomotive for a rails 1.2 stack for me to learn on before moving on to rails2.0.
I also loaded MySQL on leopard by using the Tiger version. And yes, the problem with the non-functioning preference panel has been fixed. A new preference panel can be downloaded separately, until an official leopard version of MySQL is released.

So, far I am still getting the hang of migrations & scaffolding: the sexy part of rails. So far, I am very impressed!

I’ll be making progress reports as I go along.

A framework is a program, set of programs, and/or code library that writes most of your application for you. When you use a framework, your job is to write the parts of the application that make it do the specific things you want.the domain is the universe of your application. The domain may be music store dedicated server, university, dating service, address book, or hardware inventory. So here you to figure out what’s in it, what entities exist in this universe and how the items in it relate to each other. This is equivalent to modeling database structure to keep the entities and their relationship merchant account.