Rails just keeps on changing. Rails 3 and Ruby 1.9 bring hundreds of improvements, including new APIs and substantial performance enhancements. The fourth edition of this award-winning classic has been reorganized and refocused so it's more useful than ever before for developers new to Ruby and Rails. Rails 3 is a major release the changes aren't just incremental, but structural. So we decided to follow suit. This book isn't just a mild reworking of the previous edition to make it run with the new Rails. Instead, it's a complete refactoring. You'll still find the Depot example at the front, but you'll also find testing knitted right in. Gone are the long reference chapters that's what the web does best. Instead you'll find more targeted information on all the aspects of Rails that you'll need to be a successful Web developer. Contents 5 Changes in the Beta Releases 10 Beta 11---November 24 10 Beta 10---October 28 10 Beta 9---October 6 11 Beta 8---September 9 11 Beta 7---August 25 11 Beta 6---July 27 12 Beta 5---June 28 12 Beta 4---May 26 13 Beta 3---May 11 13 Beta 2---May 3 13 Preface to the Fourth Edition 15 Acknowledgements 17 Introduction 19 Rails Simply Feels Right 19 Rails Is Agile 21 Who This Book Is For 22 How To Read This Book 22 Getting Started 26 Installing Rails 27 Installing on Windows 27 Installing on Mac OS X 29 Installing on Linux 30 Choosing a Rails Version 31 Setting Up Your Development Environment 32 Rails and Databases 36 What We Just Did 37 Instant Gratification 38 Creating a New Application 38 Hello, Rails! 40 Linking Pages Together 47 What We Just Did 49 The Architecture of Rails Applications 51 Models, Views, and Controllers 51 Rails Model Support 54 Action Pack: The View and Controller 56 Introduction to Ruby 58 Ruby Is an Object-Oriented Language 58 Data Types 60 Logic 63 Organizing Structures 66 Marshaling Objects 69 Pulling It All Together 69 Ruby Idioms 70 Building an Application 73 The Depot Application 74 Incremental Development 74 What Depot Does 75 Let's Code 79 Task A: Creating the Application 81 Iteration A1: Creating the Products Maintenance Application 81 Iteration A2: Making Prettier Listings 88 Task B: Validation and Unit Testing 95 Iteration B1: Validating! 95 Iteration B2: Unit Testing of Models 100 Task C: Catalog Display 109 Iteration C1: Creating the Catalog Listing 109 Iteration C2: Adding a Page Layout 112 Iteration C3: Using a Helper to Format the Price 116 Iteration C4: Functional Testing of Controllers 116 Task D: Cart Creation 121 Iteration D1: Finding a Cart 121 Iteration D2: Connecting Products to Carts 122 Iteration D3: Adding a Button 124 Task E: A Smarter Cart 130 Iteration E1: Creating a Smarter Cart 130 Iteration E2: Handling Errors 134 Iteration E3: Finishing the Cart 138 Task F: Add a Dash of Ajax 143 Iteration F1: Moving the Cart 144 Iteration F2: Creating an Ajax-Based Cart 149 Iteration F3: Highlighting Changes 152 Iteration F4: Hiding an Empty Cart 154 Testing Ajax changes 158 Task G: Check Out! 163 Iteration G1: Capturing an Order 163 Iteration G2: Atom Feeds 177 Iteration G3: Pagination 181 Task H: Sending Mail 186 Iteration H1: Sending Confirmation E-mails 186 Iteration H2: Integration Testing of Applications 193 Task I: Logging In 199 Iteration I1: Adding Users 199 Iteration I2: Authenticating Users 208 Iteration I3: Limiting Access 213 Iteration I4: Adding a Sidebar, More Administration 216 Task J: Internationalization 221 Iteration J1: Selecting the locale 222 Iteration J2: Translating the Store Front 224 Iteration J3: Translating Checkout 231 Iteration J4: Add a Locale Switcher 237 Task K: Deployment and Production 241 Iteration K1: Deploying with Phusion Passenger and MySQL 243 Iteration K2: Deploying Remotely with Capistrano 248 Iteration K3: Checking Up on a Deployed Application 254 Depot Retrospective 258 Rails Concepts 258 Documenting What We Have Done 261 Rails In Depth 263 Finding Your Way Around Rails 264 Where things go 264 Naming Conventions 273 Active Record 277 Defining your Data 277 Locating and Traversing Records 282 Creating, Reading, Updating, and Deleting (CRUD) 285 Participating in the Monitoring Process 301 Transactions 308 Action Dispatch and Action Controller 313 Dispatching Requests to Controllers 313 Processing of Requests 324 Objects and operations that span requests 335 Action View 345 Using Templates 345 Generating Forms 347 Processing Forms 350 Uploading Files to Rails Applications 352 Using Helpers 355 Reducing Maintenance with Layouts and Partials 362 Caching 371 Page Caching 371 Expiring Pages 374 Fragment Caching 380 Migrations 386 Creating and Running Migrations 386 Anatomy of a Migration 389 Managing Tables 393 Advanced Migrations 397 When Migrations Go Bad 401 Schema Manipulation Outside Migrations 402 Non-Browser Applications 404 A Standalone Application Using Active Record 404 A Library Function Using Active Support 405 A Remote Application Using Active Resource 410 Rails' Dependencies 416 Generating XML with Builder 416 Generating HTML with ERb 418 Managing Dependencies with Bundler 420 Interfacing with the web server with Rack 422 Automating Tasks with Rake 426 Survey of Rails' Dependencies 427 Rails Plugins 431 Credit Card Processing with Active Merchant 431 Saving Bandwidth with Asset Packager 433 Beautifying our Markup with Haml 435 Write Less and Do More with JQuery 438 Finding more at RailsPlugins.org 440 Where to Go From Here 443 Bibliography 445 Index 446 Symbols 446 A 446 B 449 C 449 D 451 E 453 F 453 G 454 H 454 I 455 J 455 K 455 L 455 M 456 N 457 O 457 P 457 Q 458 R 458 S 460 T 462 U 463 V 463 W 463 X 463 Y 463
You want to write professional-grade applications: Rails is a full-stack, open-source web framework, with integrated support for unit, functional, and integration testing. It enforces good design principles, consistency of code across your team (and across your organization), and proper release management.
But Rails is more than a set of best practices. Rails makes it both fun and easy to turn out very cool web applications. Need Ajax support, so your web applications are highly interactive? Rails has it built in. Want an application that sends and receives e-mail? Built in. Supports internationalization and localization? Built in. Do you need applications with a REST-based interface (so they can interact with other RESTful applications with almost no effort on your part)? All built-in.
With this book, you'll learn how to use ActiveRecord to connect business objects and database tables. No more painful object-relational mapping. Just create your business objects and let Rails do the rest. Need to create and modify your schema? Migrations make it painless (and they're versioned, so you can roll changes backward and forward). You'll learn how to use the Action Pack framework to route incoming requests and render pages using easy-to-write templates and components. See how to exploit the Rails service frameworks to send emails, implement web services, and create dynamic, user-centric web-pages using built-in Javascript and Ajax support. There is extensive coverage of testing, and the rewritten Deployment chapter now covers Phusion Passenger.
As with the previous editions of the book, we start with an extended tutorial that builds parts of an online store. And, of course, the application has been rewritten to show the best of Rails V2.
Provides information on creating Web-based applications with Rails 3 and Ruby 1.9, covering such topics as HTTP authentication, validation and unit testing, cart creation, Ajax, caching, migrations, and plugins
