RailsSpace Building a Social Networking Website with Ruby on Rails¿

by Hartl, Michael; Prochazka, Aurelius

• ISBN13: 9780321480798
• ISBN10: 0321480791
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-07-20
• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional

Summary

Ruby on Rails is fast displacing PHP, ASP, and J2EE as the development framework of choice for discriminating programmers, thanks to its elegant design and emphasis on practical results.RailsSpaceteaches you to build large-scale projects with Rails by developing a real-world application: a social networking website like MySpace, Facebook, or Friendster. Inside, the authors walk you step by step from the creation of the site's virtually static front page, through user registration and authentication, and into a highly dynamic site, complete with user profiles, image upload, email, blogs, full-text and geographical search, and a friendship request system. In the process, you learn how Rails helps you control code complexity with the model-view-controller (MVC) architecture, abstraction layers, automated testing, and code refactoring, allowing you to scale up to a large project even with a small number of developers. This essential introduction to Rails provides A tutorial approach that allows you to experience Rails as it is actually used A solid foundation for creating any login-based website in Rails Coverage of newer and more advanced Rails features, such as form generators, REST, and Ajax (including RJS) A thorough and integrated introduction to automated testing The book's companion website provides the application source code, a blog with follow-up articles, narrated screencasts, and a working version of the RailSpace social network.

Author Biography

Michael Hartl is a programmer and entrepreneur. Before discovering Rails, he used Zope/Python in a startup he cofounded to produce fantasy sports websites, including BracketManager, at the time the number one independent NCAA Basketball Tournament website. Previously, he was a physics instructor at the California Institute of Technology, where he received the Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in Teaching. He also served as Caltech's editor for The Feynman Lectures on Physics: The Definitive and Extended Edition (Addison-Wesley). He is a graduate of Harvard College and has a Ph.D. in physics from Caltech.

Aurelius Prochazka is a pioneer of interactive, user-driven websites and has founded several companies, including Creative Internet Design, Inc., and ArsDigita Corporation. After working extensively with many operating systems and web frameworks, he happily calls Macintosh OS X and Ruby on Rails his preferred programming environments. Aurelius is the principal developer of Caltech's main website, as well as its admissions and alumni sites. He is a graduate of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and has a Ph.D. in computational fluid dynamics from Caltech.

Table of Contents

List of Figures

Introduction

Why Rails?

Why this book?

Who should read this book?

A couple of Rails stories

Foundations

Getting started

Preliminaries

Our first pages

Rails views

Layouts

Developing with style

Modeling users

Creating the User model

User model validations

Further steps to ensure data integrity(?)

Registering users

A User controller

User registration: the view

User registration: the action

Linking in Registration

An example user

Getting started with testing

Our testing philosophy

Test database configuration

Site controller testing

Registration testing

Basic User model testing

Detailed User model testing

Logging in and out

Maintaining state with sessions

Logging in

Logging out

Protecting pages

Friendly URL forwarding

Refactoring basic login

Advanced login

So you say you want to be remembered?

Actually remembering the user

Remember me tests

Advanced tests: integration testing

Refactoring redux

Updating user information

A non-stub hub

Updating the email address

Updating password

Testing user edits

Partials

Building a social network

Personal profiles

A user profile stub

User specs

Editing the user specs

Updating the user hub

Personal FAQ: Interests and personality

Public-facing profile

Community

Building a community (controller)

Setting up sample users

The community index

Polishing results

Searching and browsing

Searching

Testing search

Beginning browsing

Location, location, location

Avatars

Preparing for avatar upload

Manipulating avatars

Email

Action Mailer

Double-blind email system

Friendships

Modeling friendships

Friendship requests

Managing friendships

RESTful blogs

We deserve a REST today

Scaffolds for a RESTful blog

Building the real blog

RESTful Testing

Blog comments with Ajax

RESTful comments

Beginning Ajax

Visual effects

Debugging and testing

What next?

Deployment considerations

More Ruby and Rails

Index

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