Ruby on Rails
Overview
Jon Kinney
Avastone Technologies

What is it?

Ruby the
Programming
Language
Rails the
Web Framework

Language Framework
Ruby Rails
C# WebForms
C# ASP.NET MVC
PHP Zend
Java Struts
Java Spring MVC

What’s the
big deal?

Fun!
Easy!
Productive!

Why
should I
care?

Broaden your Horizons

Learn from other frameworks
and languages
Be a better

What is Ruby?

Object Oriented
Java
Ruby Python
VB.NET
C++ C#

Dynamically
Typed
Not compiled
Code is executed at
run time

The Ruby
Language

The .each Method

Everything’s an objec

Defining
methods
Everything in ruby is true except nil and false
Ruby automatically returns the last statement in a
method

The “unless”
statement

“if” at the end
“else” at the end

Garbage
Object
Collection
Oriented
Good
Public and
IDE’s
Private
Methods
Similar to C#

No curly No
braces or Compile-
semicolon time
s checking
Dynamic Interpreted
Typing
Different from C#

What is Rails?

Ruby on Rails is an open-source web
framework that's optimized for
programmer happiness and sustainable
productivity.
It lets you write beautiful code by
favoring convention over configuration

Model
View
Controller
Framework

Model
req
ues
t
Controller
res
po
n se
View

All in one! ASP.NET Ruby on Rails
MVC
Presentation ASP.NET Rails
MVC
Database migrations T-SQL Rails
Data access & LINQ to Rails
persistence Entities
Unit testing NUnit Rails
Testing web pages (?) Rails
Testing cookies and (?) Rails
session state

Opinionated Software
Not
Academic
Convention
over Configuration

Conventions
• Singular camel cased model/class
names
• Plural lower case and underscored
• Db table names
• Variable names
• Method names
• Primary key called “id”
• Db fields called created_at and
updated_at
• Get free timestamps when performing

D.R.Y.
Don’t Repeat
Yourself
Each piece of knowledge should
have one and only one place to live

An object that wraps a row in a
database table or view,
encapsulates the database access,
and adds domain logic on that
data. ~ Martin Fowler Active
Record

Running Rails

Runs on ….

Store stuff in …
And others …

Write code with ….

Walkthrough
Creating a
Rails Project
in 3 Steps

Step 1

They ALL look like

Step 2 (optional)
# SQLite version 3.x
# gem install sqlite3-ruby (not necessary on OS X Leopard)
development:
adapter: sqlite3
database: db/development.sqlite3
pool: 5
timeout: 5000
# Warning: The database defined as "test" will be erased and
# re-generated from your development database when you run "rake".
# Do not set this db to the same as development or production.
test:
adapter: sqlite3
database: db/test.sqlite3
pool: 5
timeout: 5000
production:
adapter: sqlite3
database: db/production.sqlite3
pool: 5
timeout: 5000

Step 3 – Boot Mongrel
Or use the Passenger Preference Pane for
Apache2

Tada!!

DEMO
Cookbook