Figure 2.5 The new user page (/users/new).

We can create a user by entering name and email values in the text fields and then clicking the Create User button. The result is the user show page, as seen in Figure 2.6. (The green welcome message is accomplished using the flash, which we’ll learn about in Section 7.4.2.) Note that the URI is /users/1; as you might suspect, the number 1 is simply the user’s id attribute from Figure 2.2. In Section 7.1, this page will become the user’s profile.

To change a user’s information, we visit the edit page (Figure 2.7). By modifying the user information and clicking the Update User button, we arrange to change the information for the user in the demo application (Figure 2.8). (As we’ll see in detail starting in Chapter 6, this user data is stored in a database back-end.) We’ll add user edit/update functionality to the sample application in Section 9.1.

Now we’ll create a second user by revisiting the new page and submitting a second set of user information; the resulting user index is shown in Figure 2.9. Section 7.1 will develop the user index into a more polished page for showing all users.

       Figure 2.6 The page to show a user (/users/1).