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)

All about social networking services


A social networking service is an Internet service that models social relationships among people. Essentially it consists of a user profile, his or her social links, and a variety of additional services. Most social networking services are web-based and provide various ways for users to interact over the Internet, including sharing content and communications.

Early social networking websites started in the form of generalized online communities such as The WELL (1theglobe.com (1994), GeoCities (1994)Tripod (1995). These early communities focused on communications through chat rooms, and sharing personal information and topics via simple publishing tools. Other communities took the approach of simply having people link to each other via e-mail addresses. These sites included Classmates (1995), focusing on ties with former schoolm SixDegrees (1997), focusing on indirect ties.

SixDegrees.com in a way was the first to bring together the first few defining...