The session had no pre-requisits so began with an introduction to Ruby. Following a brief introduction I showed some of the driving principles behind Rails including coverage of the benefits & implications of MVC.

In an attempt to demonstrate the productivity of rails I built a web based application for tracking hours spent on tasks. The app was developed over three iterations.

• Manage tasks
• Add rendering of instalments (lumps of time spent on tasks)
• Add management of instalments

The rails project and pdf of slides is attached below.

Slides Project

There seems to be a real buzz about Ruby at the moment. People from a wide variety of backgrounds are looking at Ruby and particularly Rails trying to establish what the fuss is all about and if the promised productivity can pay off in their environment.

I took my inspiration for the session from an onlamp article that describes the development of a cookbook web application. I made a number of changes to bring the demo up to date, in particular the adoption of migrations and some further emphasis on testing.

The mixed group that is always in attendance with agile north provides for an interesting mixture of view points. I was somewhat taken aback by the suggestion that migrations should be test driven. This was a significant point that had not yet occured to me. However, when relying on migrations to move databases from on version to the next we need a mechanism to improve our confidence. I would particularly like to see tests for migrating to older versions.
I did alow a little too much emphasis to be put on the benifits of scaffolding, while it’s nice to get the rapid feedback that scaffolding provides I would have liked to spend a little more time developing “real” code (test first of course).

Below I have attached, as requested, a few slides and a zip of the Rails code that we produced during the session. In addition check out the agile north del.icio.us tag for other peoples views and other relevant links.

• Slides
• Project

I’m sure that this is not the last post I’ll make about rails, I look forward to making the most of this highly productive environment on a number of projects that I have in mind.