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)

Building the application flow


While much of the application logic resides in the data model, the flow of the application determines how the user uses Colony. Let's begin with the overall structure of the application and then we'll inspect each feature for its flow.

Structure of the application and flow

Unlike the previous clones where we stored the entire flow in a single file, Colony is too big to fit into a single file, so we split the application along the lines of its features and use one file per feature. The main file is called colony.rb. It contains the main processing necessary to log in as well as the landing page.

require 'rubygems'
gem 'rest-client', '=1.0.3'
%w(config haml sinatra digest/md5 rack-flash json restclient models).each  { |lib| require lib}
set :sessions, true
set :show_exceptions, false
use Rack::Flash

get "/" do
  if session[:userid].nil? then
    @token = "http://#{env["HTTP_HOST"]}/after_login"
    haml :login
  else
    @all = @user.feed
    haml :landing
  end...