I feel like i'm missing something with Ruby on Rails

[VinylxScratches]

I have it installed, I can get to localhost:3000 and a page pops up but uhhh, what do I do to get custom webpage hello world going? It's very vague.... 🙁

 

[PCTC2]

You should really read a book or tutorial. The Pragmatic Programmer (pragprog.com) has a few good books, but they're mostly for Rails 2.x now. A few new versions for 3.x are coming out, but they're still in 'beta'.

What Ruby-on-Rails is all about, is the MVC model. Model-view-controller.

Controllers are where the actions are defined. "Show", "Index", "Create", "New", "Destroy", are some of the default actions for a scaffold generated controller.

Models are where your data is handled. Verifications, functions for different access of the same data, etc are found in models.

Views are self explanatory. However, the default template is your application.html.erb. This is a partial HTML file with a <&#37; yield %> block in the center. This is where the code from each page will get rendered.

There are also helpers, where you can define functions (such as view functions) so your code isn't so copypasta.

To get started, you will want to generate a basic scaffold (it will generate views, a model, a helper, and a controller). All your application files are under 'app'. Say you want to create a site for handling product reviews. (Assuming you're using Rails 3.0.3), type in the rails_root (where you can see app, lib, tmp, etc) "rails generate scaffold product_review name:string reviewer:string body:text rating:integer". This will attempt to pluralize product_review into product_reviews_controller.rb, product_review.rb (model), and other files, including a migration (more on this in a bit). You want to name it the singular, because each data item will be a product_review, and the controller handles multiple of them. The model is a single. It really messes up if you type the plural sometimes (especially in Rails 2.x).

Back to about a migration. A migration is where your SQL table will be created, modified, etc. It will have a self.up and a self.down function. Up will be called when the database is "migrated", and if you tell it to bring a migration down, you'll program it to do the opposite. Remember those "reviewer:string" in the generation command? These are the columns in your table for product reviews. Review is the title and string is the type. If you type "rake db:migrate", if you have a database set up in 'config/database.yml', then it will invoke the command in the migration to create the table.

Then if you were to browse to http://localhost:3000/product_reviews you would see the title, an "add_new" link which links to a working form, and a blank table.

It should be noted that when a name is two words, it should be an underscore. Rails uses "camelcase" for its functions and classes, so when product_review is converted, the letter after the underscore becomes capital, like "ProductReview". Important.

But really, in all seriousness, if you want to learn, get a book or find someone to show you. There's a lot of nuances. Ruby coding, and Rails itself have basic knowledge you need to learn. I learned from Pragmatic Programmer books for Rails 2.x (I was using Rails 2.3.8).

 

[aceO07]

This is probably a good guide, if you haven't already started reading it.
http://guides.rubyonrails.org/getting_started.html

Also, if you already have some code written and going to http://localhost:3000 is showing the default page, you need to delete/rename the default 'index.html' file that's in the public folder.

 

[Ka0t1x]

This is probably a good guide, if you haven't already started reading it.
http://guides.rubyonrails.org/getting_started.html

Also, if you already have some code written and going to http://localhost:3000 is showing the default page, you need to delete/rename the default 'index.html' file that's in the public folder.

www.railscasts.com is great as well. But its been mentioned here about a thousand times. Ryan's got a ton of new stuff for Rails 3. (should be a rails 3 tag on the right side)

 

[VinylxScratches]

Thank you guys!

 

[PCTC2]

www.railscasts.com is great as well. But its been mentioned here about a thousand times. Ryan's got a ton of new stuff for Rails 3. (should be a rails 3 tag on the right side)

Also, if you don't feel like watching a video, some episodes are transcribed at http://asciicasts.com/