Hello again. It's been awhile since I wrote something but I am too busy building my startup Warrantly so I really don't have time to write often. Nevertheless, now it's time to share something new. Being a Java developer for years I switched to Ruby on Rails a year ago because we decided it could be the best tool to build a startup. Boy it was a great decision! Since then I am really enjoying exploring Ruby and Rails and I don't have any desire going back to Java again.
Don't get me wrong, Java is a great programming language but with Rails you can create a new functional website in literally minutes! And with Java you have to decide which framework to use, how to connect everything to work properly and you will spend hours figuring out that. A year and a half ago I wrote how to start a new project with Spring because it is too complicated and I wanted to write down few steps you need to do to connect everything to work properly. Now I will show you how to do the same thing with Rails and it is so damn simple you will need only 15 minutes.
PREREQUISITE
First you need to install Ruby and Rails 4 and you can find tutorials everywhere how to do that so I won't explain that part. You don't need any IDE to code your program, you can use any text editor (I prefer Sublime) and you'll need a console. Now it could be a little more complicated if you are using Windows but it won't make you some serious trouble.
CREATE NEW APP AND ADD GEMS
In your console, go to the directory you want to use to store your project and type this:
And you created your app! Next step is to add gems: foundation-rails, sass-rails, haml-rails, pg (for Postgres database) and add simple_form because I highly recommend using it in your app.
CONFIGURE DATABASE
If you want to connect your project with a database then you need to configure your database.yml file located under config directory:
ZURB FOUNDATION + HAML
Since we are using ZURB and HAML now you need to go to your console again and run this line:
We are installing Foundation and overriding application layout file under view directory because we want to use HAML. Now under assets/stylesheets directory find the file application.css and rename it to application.scss. You don't need to do that but if you want to use sassy css in your whole app it is good practice to do this in this step. By the way, you are probably asking what the hell are sass and scss, are they the same thing or not? I won't explain here more on this subject but you can find great explanation about them in one railscast episode.
SIMPLE FORM
Installing simple form gem is also one liner:
ScafFold + DATABASE MIGRATION
This was really skinny tutorial but I don't want to write 5 pages long post about simple stuff. Basically the application is ready to use. You can now create model, views, migration files just using one rails command, the powerful scaffold:
In your migration file which is created with this command (under db/migrate) you can add some code, this for example:
To reflect these changes to your database you need to run three commands:
With these commands you created actual database, load you schema, populated it with some seed data (if you have any under seeds.rb file) and ran your migration file to create a database table. Find more about these commands, you will need them during your development.
THE END
I hope this can help you like my previous post about SPRING did it. If you plan to launch some startup, maybe Rails is the right tool for you.
RSS Feed
