Ruby on Rails : Up and Running

by Tate, Bruce A.

• ISBN13: 9780596101329
• ISBN10: 0596101325
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-08-01
• Publisher: Oreilly & Associates Inc

Summary

"Ruby On Rails: Up and Running" covers everything thoroughly, from building a schema and making a simple controller to designing a Rails interface and building a project model - including details on how to add a controller and generate scaffolding. More advanced material is provided to help developers Map data to an imperfect table, traverse complex relationships, and build custom finders. A section on working with Ajax and REST shows them how to exploit the Rails service frameworks to send emails, implement web services, and create dynamic, user-centric web pages using built-in JavaScript and Ajax support. This book also explains the essentials of logging to find performance problems and delves into other performance optimising techniques.

Author Biography

Bruce A. Tate is a kayaker, mountain biker, and father of two. In his spare time, he is an independent consultant in Austin, Texas. In 2001, he founded J2Life, LLC, a consulting firm that specializes in Java persistence frameworks and lightweight development methods. His customers have included FedEx, Great West Life, TheServerSide, and BEA. He speaks at conferences and Java user's groups around the nation. Before striking out on his own, Bruce spent 13 years at IBM working on database technologies, object-oriented infrastructure, and Java. He was recruited away from IBM to help start the client services practice in an Austin startup called Pervado Systems. He later served a brief stint as CTO of IronGrid, which built nimble Java performance tools. Bruce is the author of five books, including the bestselling "Better, Faster, Lighter Java", "Beyond Java", and "Spring: A Developer's Notebook", all from O'Reilly.

Curt Hibbs is a senior software developer in St. Louis with more than 30 years' experience in platforms, languages, and technologies too numerous to list. With a keen (and always searching) eye for new methods and technologies to make his work easier and more productive, he has become very active in the Ruby development community.

Read his weblog at blog.curthibbs.us.

Table of Contents

Preface	vii
Zero to Sixty: Introducing Rails	1	(17)
Rails Strengths	2	(1)
Putting Rails into Action	3	(2)
Organization	5	(1)
The Web Server	6	(4)
Creating a Controller	10	(3)
Building a View	13	(2)
Tying the Controller to the View	15	(1)
Under the Hood	16	(1)
What's Next?	17	(1)
Active Record Basics	18	(18)
Active Record Basics	18	(3)
Introducing Photo Share	21	(1)
Schema Migrations	22	(3)
Basic Active Record Classes	25	(1)
Attributes	26	(4)
Complex Classes	30	(3)
Behavior	33	(2)
Moving Forward	35	(1)
Active Record Relationships	36	(18)
belongs_to	37	(3)
has_many	40	(3)
has_one	43	(9)
What You Haven't Seen	52	(1)
Looking Ahead	53	(1)
Scaffolding	54	(11)
Using the Scaffold Method	54	(3)
Replacing Scaffolding	57	(3)
Generating Scaffolding Code	60	(4)
Moving Forward	64	(1)
Extending Views	65	(26)
The Big Picture	65	(2)
Seeing Real Photos	67	(1)
View Templates	68	(7)
Setting the Default Root	75	(1)
Stylesheets	75	(3)
Hierarchical Categories	78	(6)
Styling the Slideshows	84	(7)
Ajax	91	(20)
How Rails Implements Ajax	91	(1)
Playing a Slideshow	92	(3)
Using Drag-and-Drop to Reorder Slides	95	(4)
Drag and Drop Everything (Almost Everything)	99	(7)
Filtering by Category	106	(5)
Testing	111	(18)
Background	111	(1)
Ruby's Test::Unit	112	(2)
Testing in Rails	114	(12)
Wrapping Up	126	(3)
Installing Rails	129	(5)
Quick Reference	134	(29)
Index	163