1.
Modern
webdevelopment
with
Ruby on Rails
Robert Glaser
Software Developer at Planetactive

2.
Me
• Studied at Fontys Venlo
• 26 years
• Software Developer at Planetactive - an
Ogilvy Company in Düsseldorf
twitter.com/mrreynolds

3.
Planetactive
• Ogilvy / WPP worldwide agency group
• Full service digital marketing agency

4.
So...

5.
Modern?
• What exactly does „modern“ mean?
• „Modern“ is a very subjective and
opinionated term
• So is Ruby on Rails!

6.
• 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

7.
Wait.
There are hundreds of MVC web
frameworks!

8.
„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

9.
Rails is „full stack“...
• ActiveRecord (ORM)
• ActionPack (ActionController, ActionView)
• ActiveSupport (Class Extensions, Helpers)
• ActionMailer
• ActiveResource (REST Mapper)
• Rails (Core Lib)

10.
...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

11.
ORM
• Database abstraction & persistance ORM
• ActiveRecord also a pattern
• Migrations for incremental schema
management

12.
YEAH!
I don‘t have to write
SQL!!!

13.
Yes, but you should
understand what you
are doing.

14.
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

15.
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

16.
Model
• Business logic
• Data persistence
• ActiveRecord

17.
View
• Data presentation
• User Interaction
• Template language ERB (Embedded Ruby)
• ActionView

18.
Controller
• Event handling
• Operation on models
• Redirection and rendering
• ActionController

19.
ActionController
ActiveRecord ActionView

20.
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

21.
ActionView
• ERB (Embedded Ruby)
• Javascript generators (AJAX)
• XML templates
• Reusing template elements via partials and
layouts

22.
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.)

23.
REST
• Representational State Transfer
• Representation of resources with only
HTTP
• Actions on resources defined by HTTP
methods
• Stateless
• No additional transport layer like SOAP

24.
REST

25.
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

26.
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

27.
Libraries, libraries!!
• Plugins
• Ruby Gems (Ruby‘s package management
system)

28.
So, what is Ruby?

29.
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“

30.
Everything is an object!

31.
True open classes!

32.
Loops

33.
Loops

34.
Classes, objects, loops,
iterators

35.
Symbols

36.
Symbols

37.
Classes & modules

38.
Mixins

39.
Mixins

40.
Metaprogramming

41.
Exceptions

42.
If you want to use Ruby,
use it idiomaticly!

43.
Demo time!

44.
Fin!
• Diploma thesis?
• Practical semester?
• Get in touch with me!