Ruby on Rails Crash Course

Peter Marklund

marklunds.com

Agenda - Day 1

• Presentation of course participants
• Rails background and philosophy
• Installing and configuring Rails
• Creating the "Hello World" application
• Introduction to Ruby
• Basic Rails architecture
• Get started on a simple Rails application

Agenda - Day 2, 3

• TextMate
• AJAX
• REST
• Finishing the Rails application
• Deployment
• Where to learn more and get help

Presentation of course participants

• Peter Marklund
• Great Works
• Expectations on the course

Rails Background and Philosophy

• Jason Fried
• David Heinemeier Hanson
• BaseCamp
• Hottest Hacker on Earth
• Getting Real
• Dave Thomas and the Pragmatic Programmers

Rails Elevator Pitch

Installing and Configuring Rails

• On Windows you can use the InstantRails package
• Three installation options on Mac OS X (in order of increasing difficulty)
  • The Locomotive package
  • Macports
  • Use the source

Creating the Hello World Application

• script/generate controller Say
• Map the Say controller to "/" in config/routes.rb to
• Remove public/index.html
• Create the app/views/say/index.rhtml file
• Start the webrick server
• Visit http://localhost:3000 - voila!

Introduction to Ruby

• Variables and methods
• Control Structures
• Built-in classes: String, Array, Hash
• Classes and Objects

Basic Rails Architecture

• MVC
• Models and ActiveRecord
• Controllers
• Views
• rake
• script/console
• migrations
• script/generate

Start Building the Freelancer Application

• Setup the Rails app and configure the database
• Setup the model and admin UI: script/generate scaffold_resource Creative
• Add tags with the acts_as_taggable plugin
• Add tags to the admin UI
• Build the homepage listing creatives by tag

TextMate - Editing in Style

• All of the Rails core team uses TextMate
• Automatic software updates
• Files, tabs, and navigation
• Integrates with Subversion for version control
• Extensible via code snippets and commands
• Folding - expanding/collapsing classes and functions
• The PeepCode Screencast on TextMate is very useful
• There is a TextMate Book from the Pragmatic Programmers
• The Reference Manual is quite good

AJAX

• What is AJAX?
• What can you do with AJAX?
  • Dynamically add to a list (or a select box)
  • In-Place Form Editing
  • Autocomplete a Text Field
  • Drag-and-Drop Sortable List
  • Live searching
• Rails AJAX support. How does it work?

REST - Different Apps Talking to Each Other

• REST is a lightweight alternative to RPC (SOAP)
• Rails uses CRUD over HTTP with XML
• You generate the interface with script/generate scaffold_resource
• Requires the latest Rails (Edge Rails)
• REST client not available in Rails yet

Finishing the Freelancer Application

• Add thumbnails with the file_column plugin
• Add a nice look and feel using layouts and css
• Make it possible to filter by multiple tags on the homepage
• Add searching using acts_as_ferret
• Add AJAX auto-completion and in-place form editing

Deploying the Freelancer Application

• The dark past of Rails deployment: LightTPD+FastCGI
• Zed Shaw and Mongrel to save the day
• Apache+Mongrel or Mongrel standalone
• Scalability

Where to Learn More

• Rails website, Ruby website, Ruby code repository, Ruby API, Rails API
• Recommended books:
  • Agile Web Development with Rails - Second Edition
  • Programming Ruby (The Pickaxe)
  • Rails Recipes
  • Rails Cookbook
  • Beginning Ruby on Rails E-Commerce
  • The Mongrel Book
  • RJS Book (AJAX)
• PeepCode - excellent instruction videos (screencasts)
• The Swedish Rails Community - has a mailing list
• Get involved in the community - you will get so much back!