Book Image

Ruby on Rails Enterprise Application Development: Plan, Program, Extend

By : Elliot Smith, Rob Nichols
Book Image

Ruby on Rails Enterprise Application Development: Plan, Program, Extend

By: Elliot Smith, Rob Nichols

Overview of this book

<p><br />All businesses have processes that can be automated via computer applications, thereby reducing costs and simplifying everyday operations. This book demonstrates that a modern web application framework makes an ideal platform for such applications. It shows how the attributes that make the Rails framework so successful for Internet applications also provide great benefit within a business intranet. These attributes include easy roll-out and update of applications, centralized processing and data handling, simple maintenance, straightforward code development, and scalability.<br /><br />Ruby on Rails is an open-source web application framework ideally suited to building business applications, accelerating and simplifying the creation of database-driven websites. Often shortened to Rails or RoR, it provides a stack of tools to rapidly build web applications based on the Model-View-Controller design pattern.<br /><br />This book covers topics such as installing Ruby, Rubygems, and Rails on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X; choosing and installing a database; installing an IDE for Rails development; setting up a Subversion repository to manage your code; creating a new Rails application; understanding Rails models; understanding controllers and views; improving user interfaces with Ajax; using Rails plugins to manage file uploads; using Capistrano to manage application deployment; techniques for scaling Rails applications, such as caching and using Apache to proxy through to the Mongrel server. The example application is straightforward to develop, easy to roll out, and simple to maintain.</p>

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Ruby on Rails Enterprise Application Development: Plan, Program, Extend
Elliot Smith | Rob Nichols
Oct, 2007 | 528 pages
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Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Ruby on Rails Enterprise Application Development
Ruby on Rails Enterprise Application Development
Credits
Credits
About the Authors
About the Authors
Preface
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Introduction
Introduction
Why this Book?
Why Develop?
Why a Client/Server based Web Application?
But why Ruby on Rails?
Ruby on Rails in Detail
Summary
2
The Initial Problem
The Initial Problem
A Normal Day in the Office
Examining the Data
Data Objects
Separating the Data
Naming Conventions
Back to the Data
Review the Result
How Good is the Source Data?
Tracking Who does What
Data Validation
Rory's Data
Summary
3
Laying the Foundations
Laying the Foundations
Supporting Rails Development
Addressing the Challenges
Setting Up a Rails Stack
Installing a Custom Rails Stack
Setting Up a Team Server
Summary
4
Working with Rails
Working with Rails
The World According to Rails
Setting Up a New Rails Application
Connecting Rails to a Database
ActiveRecord, Migrations, and Models
The Scaffold
Completing the Database
Models in Detail
Putting the Project into Context
Summary
5
Building the User Interface
Building the User Interface
Controllers and Views: A Recap
Creating a Simple Controller and Its Views
Adding a Controller for Companies
Advanced View Techniques
C*UD (Create, Update, Delete)
Editing Multiple Models Simultaneously
Fleshing Out Companies and Addresses
Summary
6
Into Production
Into Production
An Application Ready for Production
The Application Server
Setting up the Server
Rory's Production Installation
Errors in Production
Back Up Rails
Summary
7
Improving the User Experience
Improving the User Experience
Easy Access to the Application
Users Need to be Able to Find Items Easily
Adding AJAX to the Mix
Show and Hide Company Address Using link_to_remote
Help!
Keep Talking to Users
Summary
8
Extending the Application
Extending the Application
Dealing with User Feedback
Adding a Search Facility
Handling Errors
Adding an Authentication System
Adding Simple Task Tracking
Uploading and Attaching Files
Summary
9
Advanced Deployment
Advanced Deployment
Deployment with Capistrano
Troubleshooting Deployment
Housekeeping
Optimizing a Rails Application
Summary
10
Down the Track
Down the Track
Going off the Rails
SQL
Business Processes
The Final Destination
Running Your Own Gem Server
Running Your Own Gem Server
Serving Installed Gems
Creating a Gem Server Manually
Index
Index

Serving Installed Gems

To explain how this technique is applied, let's remind ourselves of Acme's setup. They have a production machine to which their applications are deployed, which contains most of the gems required by the developers (see, Chapter 3). Note that I said most, as Capistrano is not installed: technically, it is only required on the developer machines. However, to be able to serve it from the production machine, it needs to be installed on that machine too. (The gem_server command only offers up gems installed on the machine where it is running.) They install Capistrano (and its dependencies) with the following:

$ gem install capistrano -y

Next, they can make the gems on the production machine available via HTTP using this simple command:

$ gem_server
[2007-07-03 21:34:38] INFO  WEBrick 1.3.1
[2007-07-03 21:34:38] INFO  ruby 1.8.4 (2005-12-24) [i486-linux]
[2007-07-03 21:34:38] INFO  WEBrick::HTTPServer#start: pid=7543 port=8808

As you can see from the output, this starts a WEBrick server on the default port 8808 (gem_server -p N can be used to start the server on port N). Browsing to http://<server address>:8808/ (replacing <server address> with the IP address or domain name of the production machine) will now yield the documentation for the gems on the server. We had a brief look at this feature in the section: A Note on Rails Documentation in Chapter 3. If the gems were installed without documentation (using the --no-rdoc switch), you will just get a list of the installed gems without documentation links.

But there is another hidden aspect to the gem server: if you browse to the same address with the path /gems/, i.e. to http://<server address>:8808/gems/, you'll see the gems installed on the server displayed as links.

This indicates that the gem server is presenting its installed gems over HTTP. Once this is up and running, you can now use the gem command line tool on a developer machine to list the gems on the gem server:

$ gem list --remote --source http://192.168.13.131:8808
Bulk updating Gem source index for: http://192.168.13.131:8808

*** REMOTE GEMS ***

actionmailer (1.3.3)
    Service layer for easy email delivery and testing.
... etc. ...

(Replacing the IP address of the --source URL with the one for your server, of course.)

You can also install a gem from your own gem server with:

$ sudo gem install rails -y --source http://192.168.13.131:8808
Password:
Bulk updating Gem source index for: http://192.168.13.131:8808
Successfully installed rails-1.2.3

Setting Your Gem Server as the Default

If you want to configure gem to use your gem server as the default repository, create a file called .gemrc in your home directory (/home/username on Linux, Documents and Settings\Username on Windows). Next, add this single line (it's a YAML file):

gem: --source http://192.168.13.131:8808 -y

Remember to replace the --source URL with the one appropriate to your server. Note that I also added the -y switch to ensure that all dependencies are installed each time you install a gem. Now, each time you install a gem, your intranet gem server will be used as the default repository, rather than the public Internet gem repository.

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