Ruby on Rails Development: Part 2

Well, not the timeliest of posts, but here we go:

I want to mention first that I have moved away from the WEBrick server and moved to Apache on my Macbook. Why? Well, I work with a guy who uses this setup with Phusion Passenger and the Passenger Panel. Great little set-up but highly technical. I will include a new post shortly for instructions on installing Passenger and the Passenger Panel. They provide a very easy way to deploy your application without needing to execute a command at the Terminal command line.

Part 2 will be dedicated to understanding the rails framework and how a server interacts with http call requests and your database. Let’s say you create a rails application to store contact information. Your customer stores their contact database on your website so that they don’t have to maintain one. Why anyone would do this is puzzling, but hey! it’s just our application. So one day your customer, Mary, logs into the site and wants to get the contact info of an old friend named Francine. Well, part of your slick application is a search function that allows our user to find anyone in her list. She types in Francine because she doesn’t remember her friends last name. Here’s a picture of what happens:

As you can see, your Rails Application server receives this call request from the user through their browser. This request is received by a rails application Controller. The Controller takes the requests and queries the database for Francine’s info. Once it retrieves the information, the Controller invokes a View which is sent back to the user, Mary, for her to view! This framework methodology is called MVC or Model-View-Controller. Rails is not the only programming language to use this method. Java uses it also.

Very simple framework to understand. The more complex part about MVC is understanding the file structure of a rails application. That will be Part 3!