Book Image

From PHP to Ruby on Rails

By : Bernard Pineda
4 (1)
Book Image

From PHP to Ruby on Rails

4 (1)
By: Bernard Pineda

Overview of this book

Are you a PHP developer looking to take your first steps into the world of Ruby development? From PHP to Ruby on Rails will help you leverage your existing knowledge to gain expertise in Ruby on Rails. With a focus on bridging the gap between PHP and Ruby, this guide will help you develop the Ruby mindset, set up your local environment, grasp the syntax, master scripting, explore popular Ruby frameworks, and find out about libraries and gems. This book offers a unique take on Ruby from the perspective of a seasoned PHP developer who initially refused to learn other technologies, but never looked back after taking the leap. As such, it teaches with a language-agnostic approach that will help you feel at home in any programming language without learning everything from scratch. This approach will help you avoid common mistakes such as writing Ruby as if it were PHP and increase your understanding of the programming ecosystem as a whole. By the end of this book, you'll have gained a solid understanding of Ruby, its ecosystem, and how it compares to PHP, enabling you to build robust and scalable applications using Ruby on Rails.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
1
Part 1:From PHP to Ruby Basics
8
Part 2:Ruby and the Web

Models, DBs, and Active Record

The M in the MVC application design pattern stands for model, and in this context, we will be using Ruby’s model abstraction to connect to a database using another design pattern called Active Record. We must remember that while models are mostly used to connect to databases, they can also be used to connect to other data sources. We could have a model connect to a filesystem, a web service, and so on. The purpose behind a model is to organize our business rules, and that purpose may include connecting to various data sources.

In this chapter, we will first generate a model using some of our command-line generators in Rails. Then, we will use this model to connect to our database. Finally, we will look at Active Record and perform operations inside our database in a very intuitive way.

With this purpose and Active Record in mind, in this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • Generating models using Rails
  • Connecting to a...