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 clone


Now that we are done with the discussions on Twitter, its features and also the design of the clone, let's roll up our sleeves and get into the act of building it.

Modeling the data

The data model for Tweetclone is quite simple; it consists of two major classes—User and Status, and two minor classes that describe the relationships—Relationship and Mention.

The Relationship class defines the many-to-many relationship between users, that is it defines who follows whom. The Mention class defines the many-to-many relationship between users and statuses (aka tweets). Each status can mention one or more users and each user can be mentioned in one or more statuses. A user can have one or more statuses, while only one user can be the recipient of a status. In addition to that, because we're modeling direct messages with statuses, a user can also have one or more direct messages.

In Tweetclone we have placed all the models in a single file called models.rb.

User

Let's define the User...