Ruby on Rails™ 2.3 Tutorial: Learn Rails by Example

Chapter 2. A Demo App

In this chapter, we’ll develop a simple demonstration application to show off some of the power of Rails. The purpose is to get a high-level overview of Ruby on Rails programming (and web development in general) by rapidly generating an application using scaffold generators.¹ As discussed in Box 1.1, the rest of the book will take the opposite approach, developing a full application incrementally and explaining each new concept as it arises, but for a quick overview (and some instant gratification) there is no substitute for scaffolding. The resulting demo app will allow us to interact with it through its URLs, giving us insight into the structure of a Rails application, including a first example of the REST arcfitecture ...