Modern
webdevelopment
with
Ruby on Rails
Robert Glaser
Software Developer at Planetactive

Me
• Studied at Fontys Venlo
• 26 years
• Software Developer at Planetactive - an
Ogilvy Company in Düsseldorf
twitter.com/mrreynolds

Planetactive
• Ogilvy / WPP worldwide agency group
• Full service digital marketing agency

So...

Modern?
• What exactly does „modern“ mean?
• „Modern“ is a very subjective and
opinionated term
• So is Ruby on Rails!

• Created in 2004 by David Heinemeier
Hansson (DHH) at 37signals
• Extracted from Basecamp
(basecamphq.com)
• Based on pragmatic solutions for common
problems
• Opinionated software
• DRY - Don‘t Repeat Yourself

Wait.
There are hundreds of MVC web
frameworks!

„It‘s a very pragmatic,
very targeted framework
with a strong sense of direction.
You might not share it‘s vision,
but it undeniably has one.“
DHH
photo copyright by James Duncan Davidson

Rails is „full stack“...
• ActiveRecord (ORM)
• ActionPack (ActionController, ActionView)
• ActiveSupport (Class Extensions, Helpers)
• ActionMailer
• ActiveResource (REST Mapper)
• Rails (Core Lib)

...with many ingredients
• Instant start defaults • Strong REST support
• Webserver • Session Handling
• Logger • Middleware (Rack)
• Staging • Test Framework
• AJAX • Plugins
• Webservices • Engines
• Mail • Clean MVC
architecture
• Debugger
• Scaffolding
• Caching

ORM
• Database abstraction & persistance ORM
• ActiveRecord also a pattern
• Migrations for incremental schema
management

YEAH!
I don‘t have to write
SQL!!!

Yes, but you should
understand what you
are doing.

Convention over
configuration
• File naming conventions and assumptions
• DB naming conventions for databases,
tables, primary- and foreign keys
• Pluralization and singularization through
String inflectors
• Per-Environment configuration files

DRY - Don‘t Repeat
Yourself
• Table column names don‘t need to be
manually defined => read from DB
• Reusing code (e.g. in views via partials)
• Metaprogramming
• DSLs

Model
• Business logic
• Data persistence
• ActiveRecord

View
• Data presentation
• User Interaction
• Template language ERB (Embedded Ruby)
• ActionView

Controller
• Event handling
• Operation on models
• Redirection and rendering
• ActionController

ActionController
ActiveRecord ActionView

ActiveRecord
• Conventions (pluralized table names, ...)
• Dynamic getters and setters
• SQL mostly unnecessary
• Entity relations (1:1, 1:n, n:n)
• SQL injection protection
• Validators
• Callbacks

ActionView
• ERB (Embedded Ruby)
• Javascript generators (AJAX)
• XML templates
• Reusing template elements via partials and
layouts

ActionController
• Actions are public controller methods
• Automatic template rendering
• Multiple formats can easily be supported
• RESTful model representations
• Callbacks
• Complete routing system
• Security (CSRF, IP spoofing, etc.)

REST
• Representational State Transfer
• Representation of resources with only
HTTP
• Actions on resources defined by HTTP
methods
• Stateless
• No additional transport layer like SOAP

REST

Testing
• Test environment & database
• Fixtures or Factories, depending on you
• Unit tests for models
• Functional tests for controllers
• Integration tests for workflow
• Automated browser tests via Selenium

Made for agile!
• Test driven development encouraged
• It‘s hard not to test
• Coverage testing via rcov
• Behaviour driven development with Rspec,
Cucumber or Shoulda (Stories and
contexts)
• Iterative DB schema evolvement via
migrations

Libraries, libraries!!
• Plugins
• Ruby Gems (Ruby‘s package management
system)

So, what is Ruby?

Ruby
• Released 1995 in Japan
• Created by Yukihiro Matsumoto
„Matz“
• Ruby should feel „natural, not
simple“
• Ruby should be „more powerful
than perl, more object-oriented
than python“

Everything is an object!

True open classes!

Loops

Loops

Classes, objects, loops,
iterators

Symbols

Symbols

Classes & modules

Mixins

Mixins

Metaprogramming

Exceptions

If you want to use Ruby,
use it idiomaticly!

Demo time!

Fin!
• Diploma thesis?
• Practical semester?
• Get in touch with me!