Ruby on Rails is a development framework designed to make the creation of web applications straightforward, well structured, and productive. By using convention over configuration, it reduces the work needed to set up an application and leaves the developer to concentrate on the components that address the problem at hand. That is, the common repetitive basic tasks are dealt with seamlessly and easily, and therefore most effort can be concentrated on creating the particular elements required for the current solution.
The strengths of this framework, that make it such an excellent tool to create Internet applications, also make it an excellent system to create business applications within private networks. It allows a developer to efficiently create distributed applications. Thereby users throughout a company are able to enter, manipulate, and report on data. This is done in a way that is easy to roll out and maintain; the resulting applications are easy to expand and extend.
This book describes both how to create business applications using Ruby on Rails, and how to create the complete creative environment. This includes how to support the development process with systems such as version control and integrated development environments, and deploy the final product on efficient web and database servers.
Chapter 1 provides an overview of the book. You will learn why Ruby on Rails should be used in preference to the multitude of other programming and scripting frameworks for developing database-driven web applications.
Chapter 2 here you will learn about some of the conventions used in Rails, and the Rails framework will be introduced. We describe some methods of controlling and logging user access and discuss their merits and limitations. We also discuss data validation and user input control via form design in this chapter.
Chapter 3 outlines how to lay some firm foundations for a sustainable Rails development project. The core of this is obviously the Rails stack itself. You will learn how to install and configure this in some detail. The chapter recommends a few of the technologies closest to the heart of Rails, which can readily be used to support your development work.
Chapter 4 will help you build from an idea and an initial Rails installation to a fully-fledged data model, populated from an external data source, with full validation and unit test suite. This chapter also provides examples of how to integrate the application with external data sources, and how to share code development across a team.
Chapter 5 describes how to build a web interface on top of the models developed earlier. You will learn about creating a controller from scratch, how to add style sheets, writing complex controller actions to update multiple models simultaneously, and using pagination.
Chapter 6 describes how to set up a Rails production environment. In particular, it covers the decisions you will need to make to successfully get your business application up and running. Some coverage of error handling is presented, and we describe some systems that will make it easier to back up and restore your application.
Chapter 7 concentrates on the tools you can use to improve the user experience. These include providing links into the application, providing search tools, enhancements to the user interface, and providing help to the users.
Chapter 8 aims at showing more of the depth and usefulness of Rails, while at the same time demonstrating how to extend an existing application with new functionality.
Chapter 9 discusses advanced deployment of your application. You will learn how to deploy your application with Capistrano. You will also learn about troubleshooting deployment and optimizing your Rails applications.
Chapter 10 covers how you can improve your Rails skills further, and suggests alternative skills that complement Ruby on Rails, thereby broadening your skill set.
You need prior knowledge of Ruby on Rails, as this book helps developers to find out how to rapidly build easily-deployed, easily-supported business applications.
Developers who have completed on-line Ruby on Rails tutorials and perhaps have built their first basic application are a key group this book is aimed at, especially those who like what they have seen in the basic tutorials, and now want to know how to create an environment in which they can most efficiently develop new applications and improve their understanding of the Rails framework.
This book is also aimed at developers who particularly want to create data-centric applications within a private network, those who want to leverage the best of intranet applications to provide distributed easily maintained applications.
On completion of the book the reader will not only know how to write better Ruby on Rails code, but also how to create a development environment and roll out completed applications onto production systems.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
There are three styles for code. Code words in text are shown as follows: "We can include other contexts through the use of the include directive."
A block of code will be set as follows:
[default] exten => s,1,Dial(Zap/1|30) exten => s,2,Voicemail(u100) exten => s,102,Voicemail(b100) exten => i,1,Voicemail(s0)
When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items will be made bold:
[default]
exten => s,1,Dial(Zap/1|30)
exten => s,2,Voicemail(u100)
exten => s,102,Voicemail(b100)
exten => i,1,Voicemail(s0)Any command-line input and output is written as follows:
# cp /usr/src/asterisk-addons/configs/cdr_mysql.conf.sample /etc/asterisk/cdr_mysql.conf
New terms and important words are introduced in a bold-type font. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in our text like this: "clicking the Next button moves you to the next screen".
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