Ruby on Rails

Model-View-Controller

• Chris North's slides from Virginia Tech Info Vis course
• Ron Cytron's slides from WashU CSE 132
• James Landay's slides from GA Tech CS 160

Installing Instant Rails 2.0 on Windows

• Download Instant Rails 2.0 —  http://rubyforge.org/projects/instantrails/
• Disclaimer: I don't know of any problems from installing Instant Rails, but as with all software, you should back up your system and run a virus scan on the downloaded file before installing.
• Unzip the Instant Rails 2.0 zip file into "C:\ror"
  • Right-click on InstantRails-2.0-win.zip
  • Select "Extract All..." (in Windows 7)
  • Enter the directory "C:\ror"
  • Wait, wait, wait. Extracting the zip file took about 10 minutes on my Thinkpad T61. Your mileage may vary.

Test the Ruby on Rails Installation (InstantRails on Windows)

• Start C:\ror\InstantRails.exe
• Windows may display a security warning saying that the publisher could not be verified.
• If you continue, you will probably get a notification from Instant Rails telling you that it has moved and asking if you would like to regenerate the configuration files. Click "OK" to re-generate files.
• Next, Windows will probably present a firewall security alert about Apache.exe. We won't be using the Apache part of Instant Rails, so you don't have to allow any access (i.e. you can choose "cancel").
• At this point, a window for Instant Rails should be displayed. It will have an "I" in the upper-left corner and have traffic lights for Apache and MySQL.
• Next, enable the cookbook test application by following the steps below:
  • Click the "I" button in the top-left of the Instant Rails window
  • Select "Rails Applications" --> "Manage Rails Applications"
  • Check the box next to the cookbook application
  • Click "Start with Mongrel"
  • A console window should appear with some start up messages
  • Windows will probably present another message about Windows Firewall blocking some features. In our work with Instant Rails, we will only need to access the Mongrel server from the local machine (i.e. localhost), so you do NOT need to allow Ruby to have the ability to communicate on networks. You may wish to allow this for other purposes, but we aware that there are some security issues involved in running any server software on your computer.
• Try out the cookbook demo:
  • Open a web browser and point it to: http://localhost:3001
• Stop the application by pressing control-c in the console window

Tutorial #1

• cd c:\ruby
• use_ruby
• rails exchange
• cd exchange
• rake db:create:all
• continue with the tutorial...

Tutorial #2

• rails cookbook2
• cd cookbook2
• rake db:create:all
• def index render :text => "Hello world" end
• For the "Creating the Cookbook Database" section do this instead:
  • ruby script\generate scaffold Recipe title:string instructions:string
  • rake db:migrate
• URL for recipes will be: http://localhost:3000/recipes
• Other changes will be needed... as part of this exercise, see if you can determine where/how.