Alex K's List: Ruby on Rails

• The unit folder is meant to hold tests for your models, the functional folder is meant to hold tests for your controllers

• rake test # run tests normally  rake test TEST=just_one_file.rb # run just one test file.  rake test TESTOPTS="-v" # run in verbose mode  rake test TESTOPTS="--runner=fox" # use the fox test runner

• A Bird’s Eye View Of Rails’ Inner Workings
• This is the part I find missing in most other tutorials about any topic. I want to present an overview of the most important components of Ruby on Rails to help you understand how they work together to process requests. I will be more detailed in the controller section because that’s the most important one, and if I left things out there I wouldn’t be able to paint the whole picture.

• When the request hits your server running the Rails app, the first component handling it is the ActionController.
• The ActionController and all of its parts correspond to the controller-part of the MVC stack.
• Once controller, action and parameters are determined, the action can be called.
• But before that actually happens, Rails inspects the filter chain for the action to see if there are any filters to be executed before the action runs. Such filters are incredibly useful for things like user authentication.
• To ensure that only logged-in users of your application can access certain actions, you would define a filter that checks the session for valid credentials. Such a filter could look like this:
• o find out more about filters, read the ActionController::Filters::ClassMethods documentation in the Rails API.
• The little h you see sometimes is a helper function provided by ActionView that escapes characters that are not valid HTML. You should always use this if you’re displaying user-entered content to prevent cross-site scripting attacks.
• Tags beginning with <%= evaluate the expression they contain and insert them into the document.
• you can see another type of erb tag, without the equals sign. This means that its content is executed but not inserted into the document.
• • Partials, small template snippets that can be used to render collections and inserted into other templates
• First, simply using Ruby — a language that’s quite different from ones you’ve used before, yet similar enough not to be totally alienating — opens up your mind to new ways of thinking and new ways of perceiving programming languages.
• For many programmers, Ruby even paved the way to radically different territory, namely functional programming. Ruby is an imperative language, but its treatment of code blocks as objects equal to Strings, Numbers or any other class and its support of closures will slowly prepare your mind for languages like Lisp, Haskell and OCaml, where passing around functions is the predominant way of writing programs.

12 more annotations...

• 1. Plug-Ins Save Time

• 2. Testing is Fun and Easy with Rspec

• 3. Save Time, Use Rake

• 4. Track Application Exceptions
• 5. Mix and match between frameworks and servers with Rails on Rack

• 6. Easy Data Dumping

• 7. Keep Your Constants in One Place

• 8. Console for Working on Code

• 9. Ugly Views Getting You Down? Try Haml.
• 10. Know Where to Watch What’s Happening in Rails

8 more annotations...