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. 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 URIs, giving us insight into the structure of a Rails application, including a first example of the REST architecture favored by Rails.

As with the forthcoming sample application, the demo app will consist of users and their associated microposts (thus constituting a minimalist Twitter-style app). The functionality will be utterly underdeveloped, and many of the steps will seem like magic, but worry not: The full sample app will develop a similar application from the ground up starting in Chapter 3, and I will provide plentiful forward-references to later material. In the meantime, have patience and a little faith—the whole point of this tutorial is to take you beyond this superficial, scaffold-driven approach to achieve a deeper understanding of Rails.