Professional Ruby on Rails™

Chapter 1. Building Resources

Ruby on Rails is opinionated software. This doesn't mean that it's going to make fun of your haircut, or tell you what kind of car to drive. It does mean that Rails has definite ideas about how your web project should be structured, how it should interact with a database, how you should test, and even what kinds of tools you should use. Tasks that Rails feels that you should do often are easy, and tasks that Rails thinks should be rare are (usually) possible but more complicated. This works because the Rails team has done an exceptionally good job of deciding how web projects should work, and how they should not work.

Two important principles that Rails favors are especially useful when starting a new Rails project:

• Representational State Transfer (REST) is a relatively new mechanism for structuring a Rails application by organizing the application around resources, rather than pages.

• Test Driven Development (TDD) is an important part of ensuring the correctness and design of any software project, but Rails does a particularly good job of providing the developer with the tools needed for easy and powerful automated testing.

In this chapter, you will begin the construction of the Rails project that will carry you throughout the book. This will enable you to review the basic Rails functionality you should already be familiar with, but with an added emphasis on REST and TDD. At the end of this chapter, your Rails knowledge should be refreshed, state-of-the-art, ...