Book Image

Cloning Internet Applications with Ruby

By : Chang Sau Sheong
Book Image

Cloning Internet Applications with Ruby

By: Chang Sau Sheong

Overview of this book

Most users on the Internet have a few favorite Internet web applications that they use often and cannot do without. These popular applications often provide essential services that we need even while we don’t fully understand its features or how they work. Ruby empowers you to develop your own clones of such applications without much ordeal. Learning how these sites work and describing how they can be implemented enables you to move to the next step of customizing them and enabling your own version of these services.This book shows the reader how to clone some of the Internet's most popular applications in Ruby by first identifying their main features, and then showing example Ruby code to replicate this functionality.While we understand that it connects us to our friends and people we want to meet up with, what is the common feature of a social network that makes it a social network? And how do these features work? This book is the answer to all these questions. It will provide a step-by-step explanation on how the application is designed and coded, and then how it is deployed to the Heroku cloud platform. This book’s main purpose is to break up popular Internet services such as TinyURL, Twitter, Flickr, and Facebook to understand what makes it tick. Then using Ruby, the book describes how a minimal set of features for these sites can be modeled, built, and deployed on the Internet.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Summary


This first chapter started off with a discussion on the objectives of the book as well as the target readers for the book. The reasons behind choosing each chapter were also briefly mentioned. The bulk of this chapter however dealt with the technology stack we will use in the rest of the book. We started off the technology discussion with Sinatra, the domain specific language used for developing web applications, followed by DataMapper, a popular Ruby object-relational mapping (ORM) library and finally rounding off with Haml, a Ruby-specific templating engine. We rounded off this chapter with a description of the structure of the rest of the chapters. With this, let's start with the first clone chapter.