Part 2 of Ruby on Rails Tutorial Online

An anonymous reader writes "Curt Hibbs has released Part 2 of his tutorial Rolling with Ruby on Rails to the O'Reilly ONLamp site. The first part was published in January. Topics covered are database transactions, callbacks, unit testing and caching." From the article: "In Rolling with Ruby on Rails, I barely scratched the surface of what you can do with Ruby on Rails. I didn't talk about data validation or database transactions, and I did not mention callbacks, unit testing, or caching. There was hardly a mention of the many helpers that Rails includes to make your life easier. I can't really do justice to all of these topics in the space of this article, but I will go into details on some of them and present a brief overview of the rest, with links to more detailed information."

Comments

Rails and other Rails tutorials

[teidou]

To explain Ruby on Rails, I could say it is a highly integrated model-view-controller type web application framework. That would be like saying a Ferrari is a 4 wheeled internal combustion vehicle: true, but misses the point.

For more info, see RubyOnRails.com. An good alternative tutorial is at http://rails.homelinux.org/.

There are even better introductory materials coming. Dave Thomas (of Pragmatic Programmers) is working on a Rails book, chapters are being reviewed presently.

Rails is powerful an flexible. More importnatly, it's a lot of fun. If you are a programmer who want to enjoy web-based application development, please do take a look at Rails.

Re:Any interesting projects?

[elmartinos]

Shure! Even though Ruby on Rails is really very young, there are a few commercial sites that use it already. Here are a few links:

• http://www.43things.com/ Nice amazon-like community thingy
• http://www.basecamphq.com/ Online project management sofware
• http://www.tadalist.com/ Todo-lists
• http://www.snowdevil.ca/ Snowboard stuff

Although, the first 3 links are somewhat related.

ROR rocks!

[Pfhreakaz0id]

As a guy who has written db-driven web apps in ASP, asp.net ( alittle), perl CGI, plain JSP/Servlet and j2ee app server with EJB's (both with and without a persistence framerwork/Object-relational bridge), I can tell you ROR is my favorite. I've only been using it for two weeks on a part-time project. It's ... beautiful. I can't think of any way to describe it. It. Just. Works.

And ruby is a really nice scripting language. You should check it out.

Re:Sounds exciting...

[rubycodez]

No way this framework will replace existing java frameworks

There is actually a chance it may become a mainstream way of building an enterprise framework. There is a very cool new bytecode Ruby virtual machine and just-in-time compiler (YARV), and the next generation of Ruby, Ruby 2, will support native OS threading. Unlike Java, the source for Ruby is and will be completely open & transparent. Ruby can run on platforms where java can't, like BeOS and MS-DOS.

Re:What is this?

[JamesOfTheDesert]

It's a collection of Java Best Practices rewritten in a 'cool' geeky language. Nothing new....

Quite true. For example, Java Best Practice #1 is to avoid using long, detailed XML files for configuration, and instead use the programming languge itself, which is dynamically loaded and interpreted when needed.

Another Java Best Practice is to let the framework write the tedious boilerplate code for you. For example, in Struts, you just run

% struts myAppName

and you're halfway done writing your Web application.

Here's one more Java Best Practice: Avoid expensive , complex application server software, and do rapid development using the Web server that is built into the standard library. Then deploy to the Web server of choice with no code changes or quirky vendor-specific API hacks.