What's the easiest/quickest way to replicate in Ruby on Rails the portal functionality found in Filemaker?

I've wondered about this for a long time and not necessarily from a Rails perspective. I'm asking about Rails now because I'm starting a new job where they use Rails and want to start building a Rails app as a learning project.

I started off in IT as a Filemaker developer and found it frustrating开发者_JAVA技巧ly more difficult (if not actually difficult) to replicate Filemaker's portal functionality in standard dynamic languages, even some of the Web frameworks I've had experience with. Filemaker makes it extremely easy to create record views with scrollable tables of related records along with the ability to perform functions on those related records simply by clicking on the row or a button which is also easy to create. (It's been quite a while since I've used Filemaker so I'm sure much has changed and hopefully for the better. :-) ) You can also create related records directly from the main record view.

So, I would like to know the easiest way to create a Rails view for a database record that includes multiple sub-views (?) showing related records and the recommended way to attach dynamic functionality to those sub-views so that you can perform functions on the related records directly from the main view, without having to navigate away from the page.

I presume that would require some JavaScript for interacting with related records from the main record view. Would that be provided by my choice of external JS libraries or is there a Rails way for doing this with a particular JS library?

I could set up such a view and simple data model in Filemaker in about twenty minutes. How quickly would you expect to spend doing the same in Rails?

Examples are fine but so are URLs to repos that demonstrate examples of doing this, preferably in Rails.

Thanks in advance!