This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
2.4 Conclusion
We’ve come now 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 the 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 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.