DEVELOPMENT WITH RUBY ON RAILS

Colin Williams

Eliezer Mar Manarang

Mitchell Craig

Tam Nguyen

Becker Luu

PRESENTATION OVERVIEW• What is Ruby on Rails?

• History

• Philosophy

• Technical Information

• Competition• Tutorial

RUBY ON RAILS - WHAT IS IT?

• Ruby on Rails (or just Rails) is an open source web application framework.

• Written in the Ruby programming language.

• Designed to make programming web applications easier.

• Abstracts the commonly used and repetitive tasks.

HISTORY• Created in 2003 by David Heinemeier Hansson.

• Developed while he was working on a Ruby-based project for 37signals.

• Extracted from some his work on Basecamp, a project management tool.

MORE HISTORY...• First publicly released in July 2004 as an open source project.

• Reached a milestone in 2006:

Apple announced that Rails would be bundled with Mac OS X v10.5 Leopard.

FOUNDING BELIEFS AND

PHILOSOPHIESCOC

DRY

REST

CONVENTION OVER CONFIGURATION

• Developer only needs to specify unconventional aspects of the application.

• Makes assumptions about what you want to, and how to do it; so you don't have to!

• Makes for an "opinionated" framework.

• Just a convention!

DON'T REPEAT YOURSELF• Is the code DRY enough?

• No? Less clarity, more inconsistencies.

• Reuse code as much as possible.

• Easier to make changes later on in development.

REPRESENTATIONAL STATE TRANSFER

• Specifies a pattern that web applications should follow in development.

• Organizing your application around resources and standard HTTP verbs.

• Identify resources, manipulation of resources, self-descriptive messages.

• Follow the basic CRUD operations (create, read, update, delete)

• Example:

resources :photos

DELETE /photos/17

TECHNICAL INFORMATION:

Rails - a full-stack web application development

framework

TECHNICAL INFORMATION:INTRODUCTION

Philosophies

Default configuration

Ease of use

TECHNICAL INFORMATION:INTRODUCTION - DIRECTORY STRUCTURE

Some of the directories are:• app

• config

• db

• lib

• log

• test

TECHNICAL INFORMATION:ARCHITECTURE

MVCModel-View-Controller

encapsulate show coordinate/transmit

TECHNICAL INFORMATION:ARCHITECTURE - MVC

• Model - encapsulates the data, data access methods, business logic methods

• View - view templates rendered to be show.

• Controller - requests/responds with the user browser, communications with Model and View layer.

TECHNICAL INFORMATION: ARCHITECTURE - MVC TECHNICAL INFORMATION: RAILS COMPONENT - MVC

! ! ! ActionController

ActionView ActiveRecord

TECHNICAL INFORMATION:MODEL - ACTIVERECORD

RelationalDatabase Application

?

TECHNICAL INFORMATION:MODEL - ACTIVERECORD

RelationalDatabase

Application

ORM Models• Data• Data Accessor• Business Logic

Methods

TECHNICAL INFORMATION:MODEL - ACTIVERECORD

• Encapsulates data via objects of classes.

• Does Object-Relational Mapping to convert relational database to object-oriented classes.

• Has Data-access methods

• Has Business logic methods for processing

• All of these are called Models.

• Changes in data results in changes in both database and Model.

• ActiveRecord::BaseActionController

TECHNICAL INFORMATION:CONTROLLER - ACTIONCONTROLLER

TECHNICAL INFORMATION:CONTROLLER - ACTIONCONTROLLER

• Under ActionPack library

• 1 Model/1 View = 1 Controller

1 active entity that user interacts that changes view = 1 method inside the controller (action method)

• Action method handles routing.

• ActionController::Base

TECHNICAL INFORMATION:CONTROLLER - ACTIONCONTROLLER

Routing

TECHNICAL INFORMATION:VIEW - ACTIONVIEW

• Under ActionPack library

• Templates for different user views

• Mostly made of HTML and .erb (embedded ruby) files

• Doesn't contain business logic methods

TECHNICAL INFORMATION:OTHER LIBRARIES/COMPONENTS

• ActionDispatch

• ActionMailer

• ActiveModel

• ActiveResource

• ActiveSupport

• Railities

• more classes could be seen at Rails' API webpage:http://api.rubyonrails.org

COMPETITORS

COMPETITORS: PHP AND JAVA

• More flexibility

• More manual setup

• Claimed to be more scalable

COMPETITORS: DJANGO AND ZEND

• Very similar as they are full-stack frameworks

• Zend based off of PHP

o It inherits the flexibility

• Django based off of Python

.NET MVC• Released in 2009

• Based on C#

• Follows MVC design pattern

• Found to lack community support

o Likely due to its relatively young age

TUTORIAL TIME :)

REFERENCES:- Ruby on Rails team. “Ruby on Rails Documentation.” Internet: http://api.rubyonrails.org/ [Apr. 9, 2012]

- Ruby on Rails team. “Ruby on Rails Guides: Getting Started with Rails.” Internet: http://guides.rubyonrails.org/getting_started.html [Apr. 9, 2012]

- T. Fisher. Ruby on Rails(r) Bible. Indianapolis, IN: Wiley Publishing Inc., 2008, pp.67 - 74, 107-109, 147-149, 173-179

- T. Reenskaug. “Trygve/MVC.” Internet: http://heim.ifi.uio.no/~trygver/themes/mvc/mvc-index.html, [Feb. 26, 2012]

- M. Fowler. “P of EAA: Active Record.” Internet: http://www.martinfowler.com/eaaCatalog/activeRecord.html [Apr. 9, 2012]

- Ruby Programming Language team. “Ruby Programming Language.” Internet: http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/, [Feb. 26, 2012]

- Ruby on Rails team. “Ruby on Rails.” Internet: http://rubyonrails.org/, [Feb 26, 2012]

- R.T. Fielding. “Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures.” Internet: http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/top.htm, [Feb. 26, 2012]