Riding the Rails

Jorge Chao
University of New Orleans
Slides available online at www.cs.uno.edu/~jchao/
RailsIntro.pdf

Wednesday, April 27, 2011

 Rails Vs. Seaside Vs.
Struts+Hibernate

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 What is Rails?
• Rails is an open source web application
framework.
• It follows the Model-View-Controller (MVC)
architectural pattern that is emphasized by
some Columbian Professors Who Shall
Remain Nameless.
• It also follows other buzzwordy design
philosophies such as DRY and “Convention
over Configuration”
• To achieve DRYness, ActiveRecord provides
an Object-Relational Mapping (O/RM) layer.
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 Web Applications

• “With server-based software, no one can

tell you what language to use, because you
control the whole system...Different
languages are good for different tasks”
- Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters

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 WEBrick/Mongrel
• Rails comes with two possibilities for
running your application server: WEBrick, a
simple server intended to get you started,
and Mongrel written by the brilliant Zed
Shaw (also author of Rails is a Ghetto)
• Rails apps can be run on many web servers
including thin, Lighttpd(“lighty”), Apache
(using Passenger or mod_ruby), nginx and
others.

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 $ rails new hotness
• Here is how every rails application begins

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 App Layout
• This is what you get from rails new
<app_name>

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 Starting the Server
• From the application directory, issue rails
server.

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 All Systems Go
• Navigate to localhost:3000 to confirm your
application was created successfully.

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 Okay, So What?

• Now we have a working rails application

that does nothing.
• The ‘rails new’ command is analogous to
creating a new project in Eclipse, all the
directories are laid out for you, nudging you
toward MVC.

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 Model-View-Controller
• Supported out of the box in Rails. In fact,
you have to try really hard to break MVC.

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 DRY
• Don’t Repeat Yourself.
• The DRY principle states: “Every piece of
knowledge must have a single,
unambiguous, authoritative representation
within a system.”
• Code is made more DRY in Rails using
ActiveRecord and the separation of view
code from business logic (MVC)

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 Active Record
• Active Record was first a design pattern
outlined by Martin Fowler in his book
Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture
(Addison-Wesley Professional, 2002).
• The Active Record pattern is a way to
access data in a database. A database table
is wrapped with a class, so an object
instance is tied to a single row in the table.
Querying/modifying the table then behaves
like manipulating an object.
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 ActiveRecord
• The secret sauce of Rails. This is the
Object-Relational Mapping layer that ties
objects to similarly named tables in your
database. This is based directly on the
design pattern of the same name.
• It is database-agnostic, so the Rails code
you write to query some records, or make
table changes works across multiple
databases(these are called migrations).
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 Model Creation
• Scaffolding in rails will give you a model
with simple CRUD views and a basic
controller to start with.

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 Models
• Models are very spare at the beginning of
application development because of OR/M.
All of the attributes are stored in the table.
• I like annotating the models with their
attributes in comments via a plugin,
annotate_models.
• Methods for getting and setting are also
automatically created by rails for each
attribute (using :attr_accessors)
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 Post Model
• This is our newly created model, annotated
with schema information for clarity.

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 Convention V.
Configuration
• The good thing about all this generated
code is it gives you a general idea of where
things ought to go, and what models, views
and controllers should look like.
• Except for models. The Post model has
nothing in it! It gives no indication of
standard model configuration.

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 What to Put in a Model
• Model relationships such
as :has_one, :has_many, :belongs_to,
:has_and_belongs_to_many
• Validations: validates_presence_of,
validates_confirmation_of, or custom
validations
• Class or instance methods that don’t
belong in the controller.

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 Post Redux

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 A Final Project Example
• Here is how password authentication and
storage is being handled in a rails version of
the final project.

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 Migrations
• Migrations are a way of having a kind of
version control on your table structure/
schema.
• Rather than modify the schema directly,
migrations allow you to create the schema
using Ruby code.
• Migration generators create a file with two
methods self.up and self.down
• self.up makes the change, self.down reverts it.
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 Post Migration
• This is the migration that created our table.

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 Running Migrations
• $ rake db:migrate
• This will run all migrations that have not
been applied to the database, changing you
schema accordingly.
• $ rake db:migrate VERSION=n
• This will rollback your schema to the n-th
version specified.

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 Schema
• How rails creates the database schema.

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 SQL Console View
• Here is yet another view of the database so
far.

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 Cooking With YAML
• Rails uses YAML files to manage database
connectivity.
• YAML stands for Yet Another Markup
Language, or YAML Ain’t Markup Language,
depending on who you ask.
• YAML is a human-readable data serialization
format that takes concepts from programming
languages such as C, Perl, and Python, and ideas
from XML.

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 YAML File
• This is the auto generated YAML for our DB.

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 Free CRUD!

• CRUD is shorthand for Create, Read,

Update, and Delete, the most common
actions that are performed on database
records.
• Scaffolding generates the CRUD controller
methods and views for us.

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 New CRUD
• Creating a blog post using our new view.

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 Show View
• This is our newly created blog post.

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 Rails Console

• To query the database in rails we use the

rails console.
• The console is an instance of irb with the
application environment loaded so we can
test our application informally in addition
to querying for data.

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 Rails Console

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 Controller
• In the controller for the model, all of the
methods are controller actions that
correspond to views (new, edit, show, list,
etc.)
• Controllers are where your view logic
should go such as pagination, or page
access.

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 Controller Actions

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 More Actions

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 Create and Update

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 Views

• Views in rails are HTML documents with

embedded ruby, such as new.html.erb.
• View files with the same name as a
controller action (method) get rendered
when you navigate to the URL
• Ex: http://localhost:3000/posts/new

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 Partials
• If there is a part of a view that is repeated
in multiple views, its common practice to
put it in a partial.
• Partials are located in the same folder as
the view file with the convention that they
start with an underscore.
• Ex: app/views/posts/_links.html.erb
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 Show View
• Default show view generated by scaffold.

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 New View
• Scaffolding gives you very DRY views.

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 Edit View
• Since new and edit are basically the same
view, the common attributes have been
refactored into a partial called form.

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 Form Partial

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 Routing
• The routes.rb file in the config directory
manages routing URLs to controller
actions.
• The entire routing interface has been
redesigned in Rails 3.
• See http://edgeguides.rubyonrails.org/
routing.html for more details

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 Routing Example
• From edgerails:

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 Routing Helper
Methods
• Routing helper methods are created for
use in views.

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 Blog Routes
• Since we only have one model, we only
have one resource route.

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 Layouts

• To reproduce a standard site layout across

all views, layouts are used.
• The default layout is app/views/layouts/
application.html.erb
• Layout files use ruby yield statements to
insert desired content inside the site layout.

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 Layouts
• Our application.html.erb file.

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 Rake
• Ruby Make.
• Rake is a software build tool like make or
Ant written in Ruby.
• Applications out of the box come with
many rake tasks, and tasks can be created
for things such as testing, data importing,
new server deployments, etc.

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 Included Rake Tasks

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 Importing Course Info

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 Gems
• Gems are ruby packages that are freely
available on the web.
• Some examples of gems are: The mysql
gem for mysql connectivity, the BCrypt gem
for data encryption, devise for robust user
authentication and session management.
• Visit rubygems.org for a complete list of
gems (and to get the gem package itself).

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 links.each do |link|
• For more in-depth information there are a
ton of great resources on the web.
• http://www.railscasts.org
• http://api.rubyonrails.org/
• http://edgeguides.rubyonrails.org/
3_0_release_notes.html

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 Thanks For Listening

• Now go make a Twitter that doesn’t have

the same stability problems as Twitter with
your newfound rails knowledge.
• Make lots of money.

Wednesday, April 27, 2011