A couple of weeks back I discovered a great tutorial on Ruby on Rails by Michael Hartl at http://www.railstutorial.org
The tutorial takes you through the steps of building a Twitter-like application (not a client!) from scratch. Aside from learning Ruby on Rails, this tutorial also teaches other useful technologies, techniques and best practices, such as:
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Behaviour driven development (BDD) using RSpec for unit, integration and functional testing
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Version control using Git
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Deployment using Heroku
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Basics of web design (CSS, Ajax)
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Setting up a database (the tutorial uses the lightweight SQLite3 format, but this can be ported to ‘real’ databases quite easily with Rails)
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Generating fake data for the test/staging database as well as the unit testing database
sloccount (SLOC: source lines of code) for the complete tutorial’s source code:
$ sloccount .
...
SLOC Directory SLOC-by-Language (Sorted)
1182 spec ruby=1182
361 app ruby=361
167 vendor ruby=167
141 config ruby=141
109 db ruby=109
35 script ruby=35
...
How to read these results?
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app: The actual application is less than 400 lines of code (this even includes the generated HTML)! Try that using Java or ASP.NET… ;-)
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spec: Tests are almost 4 times the size of the actual code (~1200 lines). These tests include unit, integration and functional tests!
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Most of the remaining code is auto-generated Rails code.
You can get my commented sources from GitHub at http://github.com/draptik/railstutorial
If you want to have a look at the application: It is currently deployed at Heroku: http://draptik-railstutorial.heroku.com/