Learning Rails

Performance Analysis with New Relic RPM

michael@buildingwebapps.com (LearningRails.com, Michael Slater and Chris Haupt) — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 17:00:00 -0700

For most non-trivial Rails applications, there’s going to be some performance issues. Rails has been subject to a lot of performance criticism, but in reality, Rails can perform very well—it just takes some tuning to get there. In this screencast, which is sponsored by New Relic, we’re going to focus on the tools and service that New Relic provides for monitoring and analyzing the performance of Ruby on Rails applications.

Visit the Lesson Page at http://www.BuildingWebApps.com/learningrails/23 for lesson notes, links to code and other resources, and to post comments or questions.

Deploying to a Public Web Server

michael@buildingwebapps.com (LearningRails.com, Michael Slater and Chris Haupt) — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 17:00:00 -0700

In this lesson, we finally deploy our application to a public web server. We describe how to use MySQL for the production database, set up the Passenger application server to work with Apache, and configure and use Capistrano to manage your deployments.

Visit the Lesson Page at http://www.BuildingWebApps.com/learningrails/22 for lesson notes, links to code and other resources, and to post comments or questions.

Version control with git

michael@buildingwebapps.com (LearningRails.com, Michael Slater and Chris Haupt) — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 17:00:00 -0700

In this lesson, we put our application into the git version control system, in preparation for deploying the application in the next lesson. We do this first because the proper way to deploy an application is not to copy it from your computer to the server, but to have the server pull the application from the version control system.

Visit the Lesson Page at http://www.BuildingWebApps.com/learningrails/21 for lesson notes, links to code and other resources, and to post comments or questions.

Testing your site (Part 2)

michael@buildingwebapps.com (LearningRails.com, Michael Slater and Chris Haupt) — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 17:00:00 -0700

We’ve ignored testing so far, so you could learn as quickly as possible how to build something. This episode concludes our testing journey by focusing on the functional tests that are still broken in our application.

Visit the Lesson Page at http://www.BuildingWebApps.com/learningrails/20 for lesson notes, links to code and other resources, and to post comments or questions.

Testing your site (Part 1)

michael@buildingwebapps.com (LearningRails.com, Michael Slater and Chris Haupt) — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 17:00:00 -0700

We’ve ignored testing so far, so you could learn as quickly as possible how to build something. Now it’s time to go back and fix up the automatic tests and begin exploring how to add more complete tests.

Visit the Lesson Page at http://www.BuildingWebApps.com/learningrails/19 for lesson notes, links to code and other resources, and to post comments or questions.

Adding a Contact Form and Mailer

michael@buildingwebapps.com (LearningRails.com, Michael Slater and Chris Haupt) — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 17:00:00 -0700

In this lesson, we’re creating the Contact page. There’s two major parts to this: creating the message model and the associated forms and admin setup, and then creating a mailer that takes new messages and sends them to the site administrator via email.

Visit the Lesson Page at http://www.BuildingWebApps.com/learningrails/18 for lesson notes, links to code and other resources, and to post comments or questions.

Resources Page: Links, Categories, and HABTM

michael@buildingwebapps.com (LearningRails.com, Michael Slater and Chris Haupt) — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 17:00:00 -0700

So far, our Resources page is just a page of text in the CMS. That’s hard to maintain — we want to have a database of links, shown by category.

Visit the Lesson Page at http://www.BuildingWebApps.com/learningrails/17 for lesson notes, links to code and other resources, and to post comments or questions.

Clean-Up

michael@buildingwebapps.com (LearningRails.com, Michael Slater and Chris Haupt) — Sun, 25 May 2008 17:00:00 -0700

In this lesson we’re taking a break from adding features to do a little cleanup, including improving how we handle page titles, fixing up the main and secondary navigation, and giving the login form field immediate focus.

Visit the Lesson Page at http://www.BuildingWebApps.com/learningrails/16 for lesson notes, links to code and other resources, and to post comments or questions.

Pages and Subpages

michael@buildingwebapps.com (LearningRails.com, Michael Slater and Chris Haupt) — Sun, 18 May 2008 17:00:00 -0700

In this lesson we’re adding a hierarchy to our pages. Instead of a single pool of pages with a navigation button for each, we want to have subpages as well, which don’t appear in the top navigation bar but are listed in second-level navigation on their parent page.

Visit the Lesson Page at http://www.BuildingWebApps.com/learningrails/15 for lesson notes, links to code and other resources, and to post comments or questions.

Using Textile Markup, plus In-Place Editing with Ajax

michael@buildingwebapps.com (LearningRails.com, Michael Slater and Chris Haupt) — Sun, 11 May 2008 17:00:00 -0700

In this lesson we’re going to add two features to our content-management system: Textile markup and in-place editing. Both are, in principle, very simple to implement, thanks to a couple of Rails gems and plugins, as well as the Prototype and Scriptaculous JavaScript libraries.

Visit the Lesson Page at http://www.BuildingWebApps.com/learningrails/14 for lesson notes, links to code and other resources, and to post comments or questions.

Admin Pages

michael@buildingwebapps.com (LearningRails.com, Michael Slater and Chris Haupt) — Sun, 04 May 2008 17:00:00 -0700

In this lesson, we implement the actual administrative dashboard using improvements we make to the mini-CMS we are building. We finish up with an improvement to our navigation code so we can build the tabbed interface more dynamically.

Visit the Lesson Page at http://www.BuildingWebApps.com/learningrails/13 for lesson notes, links to code and other resources, and to post comments or questions.

User Management

michael@buildingwebapps.com (LearningRails.com, Michael Slater and Chris Haupt) — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 17:00:00 -0700

In this lesson, we work towards implementing an administrative dashboard by expanding the user controller generated by restful_authentication to give us full abilities to manage user data.

Visit the Lesson Page at http://www.BuildingWebApps.com/learningrails/12 for lesson notes, links to code and other resources, and to post comments or questions.

Adding User Authentication

michael@buildingwebapps.com (LearningRails.com, Michael Slater and Chris Haupt) — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 17:00:00 -0700

In this lesson, we add user authentication so only logged-in users can access the page controller and modify the contents of the site.

Visit the Lesson Page at http://www.BuildingWebApps.com/learningrails/11 for lesson notes, links to code and other resources, and to post comments or questions.

Putting the Page Contents into the Database

michael@buildingwebapps.com (LearningRails.com, Michael Slater and Chris Haupt) — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 17:00:00 -0700

In this lesson, the second screencast in the Learning Rails course, we create our first database table and Rails model. In the previous lesson, we created static pages, with all the contents in the view files. In this lesson, we put the page contents into the database, so we can provide an administrative interface that allows non-technical users to modify the pages.

Visit the Lesson Page at http://www.BuildingWebApps.com/learningrails/10 for lesson notes, links to code and other resources, and to post comments or questions.

The Simplest Possible Rails Application

michael@buildingwebapps.com (LearningRails.com, Michael Slater and Chris Haupt) — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 17:00:00 -0700

This is the first screencast in the Learning Rails course. In this lesson, we build a very simple Ruby on Rails application, with just a few static pages, so we can walk through the files and show how the view system works.

Visit the Lesson Page at http://www.BuildingWebApps.com/learningrails/9 for lesson notes, links to code and other resources, and to post comments or questions.

Setting Up Your Development Environment

michael@buildingwebapps.com (LearningRails.com, Michael Slater and Chris Haupt) — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 17:00:00 -0700

Having made it this far in our series, you should have a good overview of the core concepts used in Ruby on Rails. The next step is to start building something! We’re going to lead you through that too, with our upcoming screencasts. For you to follow along, you’re going to need a development environment set up on your computer, and in this podcast we discuss the steps in doing so.

Visit the Lesson Page at http://www.BuildingWebApps.com/learningrails/8 for lesson notes, links to code and other resources, and to post comments or questions.

Testing Rails Code

michael@buildingwebapps.com (LearningRails.com, Michael Slater and Chris Haupt) — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 16:00:00 -0800

Ruby on Rails incorporates tools that facilitate best practices when it comes to testing your code. Whether you leverage the built-in Test::Unit framework or add one of many more advanced testing tools, you can begin to build a “quality safety net” through a collection of unit, functional, and integration tests. We’ll walk through how to get started writing and using tests, touch on some testing methodologies such as TDD and BDD, and get you familiar with the tools that will help maintain the quality of your application.

Visit the Lesson Page at http://www.BuildingWebApps.com/learningrails/7 for lesson notes, links to code and other resources, and to post comments or questions.

Tools for Rails Developers

michael@buildingwebapps.com (LearningRails.com, Michael Slater and Chris Haupt) — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 16:00:00 -0800

The Ruby on Rails approach to application development goes beyond just your code itself; there’s a variety of tools and practices that are a nearly integral part of it. These include keeping all your source code in a version control system (typically Subversion); the Rake automation tool; ri and rdoc documentation tools; and the Capistrano deployment tool; logging facilities; and the ruby-debug debugger.

Visit the Lesson Page at http://www.BuildingWebApps.com/learningrails/6 for lesson notes, links to code and other resources, and to post comments or questions.

Rails Form Processing

michael@buildingwebapps.com (LearningRails.com, Michael Slater and Chris Haupt) — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 16:00:00 -0800

Ruby on Rails provides a variety of facilities to simplify the use of forms to enter and update database information, which is one of the most common tasks for any web application. These include form helpers, which generate the HTML code for the form, validation methods for use in model classes that make it easy to check entered information for errors, and helpers to display those errors. We’ll describe how all these features work together.

Visit the Lesson Page at http://www.BuildingWebApps.com/learningrails/5 for lesson notes, links to code and other resources, and to post comments or questions.

Rails Models

michael@buildingwebapps.com (LearningRails.com, Michael Slater and Chris Haupt) — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 16:00:00 -0800

Rails provides an elegant set of tools for creating your database and accessing it. Migrations are simple Ruby files that let you create your database tables without SQL. You access the database through the model objects you create, which inherit a rich set of capabilities from Active Record. You can define associations between models that enable you to easily access related data that is spread across multiple tables.

Visit the Lesson Page at http://www.BuildingWebApps.com/learningrails/4 for lesson notes, links to code and other resources, and to post comments or questions.

Rails Views -- How Rails Renders Pages

michael@buildingwebapps.com (LearningRails.com, Michael Slater and Chris Haupt) — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 16:00:00 -0800

Rails creates web pages through a combination of layouts, templates, and partials. We’ll explore how they work together to create a powerful mechanism for laying out web pages. We’ll also touch on the Ajax support that is built in to Rails.

Visit the Lesson Page at http://www.BuildingWebApps.com/learningrails/3 for lesson notes, links to code and other resources, and to post comments or questions.

Anatomy of a Web Application

michael@buildingwebapps.com (LearningRails.com, Michael Slater and Chris Haupt) — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 16:00:00 -0800

In this episode, we look at just what happens when a user enters a URL in their browser, and how this is translated into a request for a specific file in a static site or a typical PHP site. In a Rails application, it instead becomes a request to execute a particular action in a particular controller, which will use model objects to request data from the database and then pass that information, in the form of a variable, to the view, where it will be rendered into a page.

Visit the Lesson Page at http://www.BuildingWebApps.com/learningrails/2 for lesson notes, links to code and other resources, and to post comments or questions.

Why You Should Learn Ruby on Rails

michael@buildingwebapps.com (LearningRails.com, Michael Slater and Chris Haupt) — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 16:00:00 -0800

Ruby on Rails is one of the fastest-growing web development platforms. In this inaugural Learning Rails podcast, we explain what Ruby and Rails are, the huge “sweet spot” for Rails applications, and why it is worth investing your time to learn the platform.

Visit the Lesson Page at http://www.BuildingWebApps.com/learningrails/1 for lesson notes, links to code and other resources, and to post comments or questions.