Ruby is a language developed with programmer happiness in mind. One way to make programmers happy is to boost speed and efficiency and Ruby on Rails accomplishes just that. My experience with Rails has been a positive one and since I am still relatively new to the world of web development, I have put to great use the conventions and configurations that are set up out of the box. Yet, with all of these configurations, Rails still manages to leave plenty of room for one to customize and modify an application to accommodate unique requirements and functions that may be needed. I work in a meat market and we often get custom orders. The only way we currently keep track of those orders is to write them on paper and posting them clipboards. I thought this would be the perfect model for an ActiveRecord Rails application so that is what I designed the app around. It is called “Market Manager”. In this article, I will be detailing how Rails conventions boosted my productivity in building this app as well as some of the features that add individuality.
Let’s begin with a little introduction to the history of Ruby itself. Ruby is a high level, interperated programming language created by Yukihiro Matsumoto, better known as “Matz” in 1995. It supports procedural, object oriented and funtional programming. It revolutionized the programming world. Ruby was influenced by Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, Basic, and Lisp. Matsumoto wanted to create a truly object oriented language and that he did. Everything in Ruby is an object. In fact all you can do in Ruby is call methods on objects. It was designed with programmer productivity in mind. Another thing that is important in the Ruby communty is that programming should be fun! That leads us in to Rails.
This is a guide a on how to go from an empty canvas to a fully functional app using Sinatra and ActiveRecord. This app will be complete with the Model, View, Controller (MVC) structure and persistence of data. I am currently building an app that allows a user to sign up with a secure password and create, read, update and delete orders. I work at Whole Foods in the Meat Market and around this time of the year there are hundreds of customer orders that can be hard to keep track of with just pen and paper. I am building this app to one day use it myself at work to keep track of those orders.
There are a lot of valuable tools in web browsers like Chrome and code editors such as Atom or VSCode that make it easy for someone new to programming be able to jump right in and get started writing code. Many people have no idea of the vast scope and capability of Chrome’s developer tools that are built right into the browser. I’m going to talk about some of these tools and how they helped me get excited about two languages, in particular, CSS and HTML. First, let’s talk about how much of the learning curve associated with those languages is undercut by the implementation of a code editor.