Super Duper Basics of Rails

A talk I gave at Belfast Ruby on my experiences learning Rails

Transcript

1. THE SUPER DUPER BASICS OF RAILS TOMMY PALMER @tommypalm
2. A bit of backstory...
3. I’m Tommy
5. EX-IMDER
6. Interactive Multimedia Design
7. Design
8. HTML, CSS + Wordpress
9. Aren’t you a developer?
10. HELL YEAH I AM!
11. What happened?
14. Ruby on Rails is optimised for programmer happiness and productivity.
15. STUFF THAT I WISH I KNEW ABOUT RAILS TWO YEARS AGO & WHY I WANTED TO LEARN IT
16. Ruby is easy to read
17. Easier than this
18. question = "Isn't Ruby great?" question = question.upcase puts question => "ISN'T RUBY GREAT?"
19. The Belfast Ruby Scale
20. The Belfast Ruby Scale
21. Ruby is a language Rails is a framework
22. Rails lets you do common web app things • working with databases • rendering HTML • sending email • and more...
23. Rails comes packaged as a gem
24. EH?
25. Gems give extra functionality to Ruby: • working with apis • tools for blogging • stylesheets (sass)
26. Rails is a framework for rapid web development
27. ActiveRecord is for databases
28. ActionView renders our HTML
29. ActionMailer deals with emails
30. ActionPack deals with HTTP requests & responses
31. ActionModel deals with our data
32. ActionResource deals with HTTP actions (GET, PUT, POST, DELETE)
33. ActiveSupport extends Ruby with lots of helpful bits
34. Railties brings them all together
35. We also get the rails command
36. Generates a blank Rails app rails new ourcoolapp
37. Starts a local server rails server
38. No MAMP! Yay!
39. Starts our Rails app in the Terminal and interacts with it rails console
40. Before we continue
41. Does not generate a blog rails new blog
42. Does not generate Twitter rails new twitter
43. Does not generate Basecamp rails new basecamp
44. This message brought to you by @shylands
45. DESIGNERS! DON’T BE AFRAID OF...
46. THE TERMINAL It’s not that bad
47. The Terminal is where you are in your filesystem
48. Moving into your Rails app let’s us do the command line stuff cd ourcoolapp
49. A blank Rails app
50. /app is where most of our work happens
51. NOW FOR THE JUICY BITS!
52. Rails is an MVC framework
53. /models - Models /views - Views /controllers - Controllers
54. Models are our data types posts, users, photos, etc
55. Views are the HTML (with some Ruby magic)
56. Controllers link the Models and Views
57. routes.rb is our URLs
58. Views have the extension .html.erb
59. ERB stands for Embedded Ruby
60. <% @posts.each do |post| %> <div class="post"> <h1><%= post.title %></h1> <p><%= post.body %></p> <b><%= post.pub_date %></b> </div> <% end %>
61. Inside <% %> is evaluated Ruby code
62. Inside <%= %> is output to the HTML
63. Controllers process traffic and fill the ruby code
64. /posts/1 show.html.erb Post with ID 1 def show @post = Post.find(params[:id]) end
65. Model View Controller routes.rb Browser
66. Model View Controller routes.rb Browser
67. Model View Controller routes.rb Browser
68. Model View Controller routes.rb Browser Database
69. Model View Controller routes.rb Browser Database
70. Model View Controller routes.rb Browser Database
71. Model View Controller routes.rb Browser Database
72. Model View Controller routes.rb Browser Database
73. This generates our Model, Views, Controller and some other stuff... rails g scaffold post title:string body:text pub_date:date
74. ...including Migrations!
75. Migrations are great!
76. Migrations let us incrementally update our database
77. class CreatePosts < ActiveRecord::Migration def change create_table :posts do |t| t.string :title t.text :body t.date :pub_date t.timestamps end end end
78. Migrates the database rake db:migrate
79. rake db:migrate # Migrate the database (options: VERSION=x, VERBOSE=false). rake db:migrate:status # Display status of migrations rake db:rollback # Rolls the schema back to the previous version (specify steps w/ STEP=n). rake db:schema:dump # Create a db/schema.rb file that can be portably used against any DB supported by AR rake db:schema:load # Load a schema.rb file into the database rake db:seed # Load the seed data from db/seeds.rb rake db:setup # Create the database, load the schema, and initialize with the seed data More rake commands
80. Rails knows plurals of lots of objects (through ActiveSupport)
81. post - posts user - users octopus - octopi sheep - sheep
82. Model - post.rb Controller - posts_controller.rb Views - show, index, new & edit.html.erb Migration - (unix timestamp)_create_posts.rb routes.rb - resources :posts rails g scaffold post
83. Scaffolds let us prototype quickly
84. rails g scaffold post title:string body:text pub_date:date
85. Not so great in the long run
86. Generate separately rails g controller users rails g model user rails g migration CreateUsers
87. More useful code Less crappy code
88. Better use of time Cleaner application
89. Rails makes good web development easier
90. Being a Rails dev
91. New to Rails?
92. Used it before?
93. Rails is pretty sweet
94. thanks! TOMMY PALMER @tommypalm hi@tommyp.org tpalmer@rumblelabs.com
95. questions to @ belfastruby TOMMY PALMER @tommypalm hi@tommyp.org tpalmer@rumblelabs.com