As some of you know, when I’m not working I’m taking classes in Information Systems at UCF. One of the classes I took this semester was Web Systems II, which is essentially a server-side course that focuses on ASP.NET development.

One particular assignment was creating a “Category Code Manager”, which I had never heard of previously. I think the professor made the term up, but the concept is simple nonetheless. There are categories (ie: fruits) that each can have many codes (ie: apples, oranges). I think the purpose of the assignment was to get used to working with foreign keys, and building dynamic drop downs as a tool to display this sort of relationship. Another gotcha is that the categories can have parent categories.

The class had a participation grade that I must have overlooked… Needless to say that didn’t bode well for me, so I created this screencast as an introduction to Ruby on Rails (beginner level) using the new Rails 2.0 (final source code included.) I tried to follow best practices where possible (ie: TDD), and covered the topics of:

• Database agnosticism & environments
• Using rake to create databases, and to run
• Scaffold generator
• has_many & belongs_to relationships within ActiveRecord
• The interactive Rails console
• The new integration of the ruby debugger, and a drop of live metaprogramming
• Test Driven Development with Test::Unit
• Intro to REST’ful architecture within Rails

But, I left some things out to avoid making the screencast even longer, and avoid it being confusing for beginners. Just so you all know, some changes I would have made include:

• Create some helper methods for things like populating the select tags
• Use nested routing (I did this first, but renaming all the named routes, having to explain the routing, etc made this too complex for a beginner video)
• Use RSpec for testing (RSpec’s scaffold uses mocks and stubs, which are just a little too much to explain when already introducing all of Rails and testing)
• Use a REST’ful abstraction plugin (we developed an internal one at work, but unfortunately we haven’t been able to open source it yet… until then check out make_resourceful)
• Use the ObjectMother pattern for creating objects during tests

Enjoy the screencast!

This entry was posted on Friday, December 7th, 2007 at 11:38 am and is filed under REST, Web, Ruby, Ruby on Rails.