It is impossible not to notice Ruby on Rails. It has had a huge effect both in and outside the Ruby community… Rails has become a standard to which even well-established tools are comparing themselves to.

~ Martin Fowler, Author of Refactoring, PoEAA, XP Explained

Anatomy of a Ruby on Rails Application

An introduction to software development using the Ruby on Rails framework

Andrew Briening (abriening)

Content

• What is Ruby?
• What is Rails?
• Why should I care?
• Creating a Rails project (code examples)
• Tools & Techniques

Rails is an application framework

• For building web-browser-based applications
• For building REST APIs
• Tools to ease development of these applications
• Easy to extend the functionality for custom features
• Convention over configuration
• …

Ruby is the language

• Object Oriented
• Dynamic language (interpreted, not statically typed)
• Principled (POLA, KISS)
• …

Why should I care?

• Community
• Open-source
• Promoting security best practices
• Promoting development best practices
• …

Let's create a new application

                        rails new [project]



          

Rails Skeleton - /[folders]

├── app
├── config
├── db
├── lib
├── log
├── public
├── script
├── test
├── tmp
└── vendor

Rails Skeleton - /[files]

├── Gemfile
├── Gemfile.lock
├── README.{rdoc,md,textile}
├── Rakefile
└── config.ru

Rails Skeleton - /app

├── app
│   ├── assets
│   │   ├── images
│   │   ├── javascripts
│   │   └── stylesheets
│   ├── controllers
│   ├── helpers
│   ├── mailers
│   ├── models
│   └── views
│       ├── layouts
│       │   └── application.html.erb
│       └── ...

Rails Skeleton - /config

├── config
│   ├── application.rb
│   ├── boot.rb
│   ├── database.yml
│   ├── environment.rb
│   ├── environments
│   │   ├── development.rb
│   │   ├── production.rb
│   │   └── test.rb
│   ├── initializers
│   │   ├── inflections.rb
│   │   ├── mime_types.rb
│   │   └── secret_token.rb
│   ├── locales
│   │   └── en.yml
│   └── routes.rb

Rails Skeleton - /db

├── db
│   ├── development.sqlite3
│   ├── migrate
│   │   └── 20120816010724_....rb
│   ├── schema.rb
│   ├── seeds.rb
│   └── test.sqlite3

Rails Skeleton - /test

├── test
│   ├── factories.rb
│   ├── fixtures
│   ├── functional
│   │   └── ..._test.rb
│   ├── integration
│   ├── performance
│   ├── test_helper.rb
│   └── unit
│       ├── ..._test.rb
│       └── helpers
│           └── ..._helper_test.rb

Tools & Techniques

• RVM or rbenv
• Bundler
• Rubygems, The Ruby Toolbox
• Plugins, have generally fallen out of favor.
• Testing frameworks, Test::Unit, Rspec, minitest, steak, cucumber
• Rack
• …

End