PODCAST

Rails Coach

Charles Max Wood

Your Playbook for Ruby on Rails

technology software how-to

All Episodes

8:21

Debugging

Rails Coach ·

2011/06/17

We talked quite a bit today about debugging tools in the Ruby Rogues podcast. I recorded this before that episode. Here's a brief introduction on how to use debuggers to find problems in your Rails code. The basic idea is that your set a breakpoint in your application, which causes the application to stop processing and allow you to access the application's state and step through the methods being called in order to find the cause of your problem. With the Ruby Debug library, all you need to do is

9:38

Convention over Configuration

Rails Coach ·

2011/06/03

The idea behind convention over configuration is that rather than having several or one large configuration file to set up the framework for you to use, Rails uses conventions to determine how things should work without configuration. In many cases in Rails, there are ways to override the default convention, but most people stick to the conventions. The conventions make it easy to set up and get started with Ruby on Rails. They also make it extremely easy for a person unfamiliar with your Rails

11:30

Ruby on Rails Routing

Rails Coach ·

2011/05/27

Ruby on Rails routing can be a little confusing. Here are some of the high points. The root path is specified by the 'root' method. It matches the '/' path and behaves like 'match'. The 'match' method will match the requested path to the string passed to match and route to the controller and action specified. # Sends requests to /users/list to PeopleController#index match "users/list", :to => "people#index" You can also extract variables from the path. # Matches /user/1/edit and passes '1'

9:56

Rails Engines

Rails Coach ·

2011/05/20

Rails Engines are a terrific way of mounting on Ruby on Rails application into another. A Rails Engine is basically a Rails application with an Engine class installed. The main application—the application your engine is mounted into—uses the generators, rake tasks, and routes from engines automatically. As of Rails 3.1, rake tasks are provided to move migrations and assets into the main application. You can use Engines to add features to your current application or you can use it to provide an

13:19

009 RC RubyGems and Bundler

Rails Coach ·

2011/05/12

Ruby has a package manager for its libraries or gems. It should be a concept familiar with other package managers like apt, yum, or yast. Gems are libraries for Ruby. Many gems are built to extend Ruby on Rails and are a great way to add functionality to your application. You can see available gems at RubyGems.org. In order to install Rails, you typically need Rubygems installed via a "gem install rails". To get a pre-release version of Rails, you can run "gem install rails --pre". Gems for use

14:24

008 RC ActiveRecord Migration Gotchas

Rails Coach ·

2011/05/07

Rails Migrations are generally pretty straightforward, but there are a few things that people do that wind up giving them headaches later on. First, don't change migrations once they've been committed or deployed. This causes problems because ActiveRecord tracks migrations that have already been run. So, editing a migration that's already been run will result in your changes not being made. Second, use Rails' built in migration and model generators. It generates the id number in the front of the

11:17

007 RC Rails Authorization Basics

Rails Coach ·

2011/04/30

Libraries for Authorization controls in Ruby on Rails are not nearly is prolific as they are with Authorization. The one I typically use is Cancan. The thing I like about Cancan is that it provides fairly granular model level controls. You have to do the checks—Rails won't do them for you—but they are fairly straightforward. The other thing I like about it is that it provides some Controller level controls through a before filter you can include that will pull up the model, load the object, and

15:18

006 RC Ruby on Rails Authentication Basics

Rails Coach ·

2011/04/14

In a lot of web applications, you need to control who can access your data. Authentication is the key to this type of security. Ruby on Rails has some plugins and gems that make authentication pretty easy. Here are a few: restful-authentication authlogic devise When putting authentication together, make sure that your authentication schema provides encryption for your passwords and a salt to make it more difficult for hackers to figure out which users are using the same password. Also make

13:32

005 RC Testing Tools for Rails

Rails Coach ·

2011/04/08

There are a lot of tools for testing Rails. Here are links to several of the ones mentioned in this podcast. Test Unit RSpec Cucumber Mocha Flexmock Factory Girl You can find my interview with David Heinemeier Hansson here, and my response to his comments on Twitter here. Finally, here are a few other resources for you to get started with testing Ruby on Rails. Introduction to Outside-In Development with Cucumber Here's a transcript of the podcast: Rails Coach Podcast, Episode 5

12:50

004 RC Ruby on Rails Model Validations

Rails Coach ·

2011/03/31

You can get the video version of this podcast here. I've also updated the audio files for episodes 2 & 3 so you can hear them now. Sorry for the trouble. Ruby on Rails provides some excellent ways to validate the data you save in your models. Validations are methods called within the class definition specifying an attribute to check and what to look for. class User < ActiveRecord::Base validates_presence_of :username end Validations are called when you call 'save', 'create', or 'valid?'. If

9:34

003 RC Single Table Inheritance (STI)

Rails Coach ·

2011/03/25

Single Table Inheritance is a slightly advanced topic in Ruby on Rails. It stems from class inheritance, which is a core Object Oriented Programming principle. In Ruby, if you inherit one class from another, you use the '<' operator. Here's an example: class Truck < Car end In Rails, this gets tricky because when inheriting a Model, do you use the parent models connection and table? or your own? By convention, you use the parent's table, which means that you need some way of differentiating

10:24

002 RC Model View Controller (MVC)

Rails Coach ·

2011/03/18

This is a brief explanation of how Rails implements the MVC design pattern to create such an awesome framework for building websites. In a nutshell, when a request comes to a Ruby on Rails website, it's handed the dispatcher. The dispatcher consults the routes provided in the application to determine which Controller and action to pass the request to. A Controller is a class which has methods called actions on it. The request is handled by a particular action on a controller. The Controller may

9:11

001 RC Do I Need to Know Ruby?

Rails Coach ·

2011/03/11

Some people wonder if they need to know Ruby to program Ruby on Rails. My answer is "kind of." Ultimately, when you program in Ruby on Rails, you program in Ruby. That being said, you don't need to know the ins and outs to get started with Ruby on Rails. I didn't when I got started. It does make a difference in understanding how Rails works once you get past the basics. Download this episode

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