This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
2.4 Conclusion
We’ve now come to the end of the high-level overview of a Rails application. The toy app developed in this chapter has several strengths and a host of weaknesses.
Strengths
- High-level overview of Rails
- Introduction to MVC
- First taste of the REST architecture
- Beginning data modeling
- A live, database-backed web application in production
Weaknesses
- No custom layout or styling
- No static pages (such as “Home” or “About”)
- No user passwords
- No user images
- No logging in
- No security
- No automatic user/micropost association
- No notion of “following” or “followed”
- No micropost feed
- No meaningful tests
- No real understanding
The rest of this tutorial is dedicated to building on these strengths and eliminating the weaknesses.
2.4.1 What We Learned in This Chapter
- Scaffolding automatically creates code to model data and interact with it through the web.
- Scaffolding is good for getting started quickly but is bad for gaining understanding.
- Rails uses the Model--View--Controller (MVC) pattern for structuring web applications.
- As interpreted by Rails, the REST architecture includes a standard set of URLs and controller actions for interacting with data models.
- Rails supports data validations to place constraints on the values of data model attributes.
- Rails comes with built-in functions for defining associations between different data models.
- We can interact with Rails applications at the command line using the Rails console.