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)

Deploying the clone


Unlike as in the previous chapters, we will only see how we deploy to a normal server, and not to Heroku. This is because while we store most of our data on Amazon, for fast processing we actually keep temporary cached files in the same server. Unfortunately Heroku doesn't provide for non-database file storage (we are not allowed access to the file server). While there are a few other ways of deploying Photoclone on a non-dedicated server, the steps are almost the same. We will only describe one way of deploying the service.

Deploying on a server

For development purposes we would normally run it off the command line using the built-in web server. However, before we do this, we need to set up the database. For this application we would need to have MySQL already installed. At the command line go into the MySQL interactive command console:

$ mysql –u <username> -p <password>

Then just do a simple command:

mysql> create database photoclone;

This will just create...