Training: Intro to Ruby on Rails

Facilitated by Josh Crawford, Brattleboro Tech Collective

Josh will lead a rich introduction to the Ruby on Rails development platform. The session will lay out fundamental architecture and conventions, implement the obligatory “Hello World” app, and then let participant questions drive the agenda.

Take-Aways

• Ruby is the language, Rails is the framework
• RoR is optimized for developer time; it provides application structure, creates scaffolding, and provides debug tools. RoR gives devs the opportunity to do more of the fun stuff.
• "Migrations" let you keep db changes in code
• Rails is a moving target (the framework changes frequently), performance is a known (and controversial) issue

Basics

• need to have the RoR library installed to run RoR
• one command installs a website + database
• can create a development server with Rails
• 'script/generate' auto generates a whole
• provides a lot of developer oriented tools
• Rails is easy to deploy, but there are multiple ways to do it
• model/view/controller framework

WHAT'S A CONTROLLER?

• controller: takes the input from the user and spits it back out

WHAT ARE ADVANTAGES/DISDVANTAGES OF PHP vs. Rails?

• comparing Rails to a language not a fair comparison (cross between small talk and Perl)

WHAT IS WORKING WITH A DATABASE USING RoR LIKE?

• has lots of extensions so can work with lots of different databases
• RoR looks at the whole system

WHERE CAN YOU FIND TEMPLATE TAGS?

• template tags can be found at http://api.rubyonrails.org

WHERE CAN I FIND COMMUNITY SUPPORT?

• - job board could have some good leads on
• - Ruby On Rails meetups
• - Planet Rails
• - Engine Yard - flexible, send people out to speak

Links

• Rails API Reference
• Official Rails Blog
• Ryan's Scraps (home of What's New on Edge Rails)
• Agile Web Development with Rails - the most often referenced book for learning Rails
• Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby - Some people love this. YMMV.