Rails 4 Application Development: Hotshot

Build simple to advanced applications in Rails 4 through 10 exciting projects

Overview

• Build interesting application scenarios with Rails 4
• Upgrade your knowledge for the latest changes in the Rails framework
• Follow the project-based approach to building applications from simple to advanced skill levels

In Detail

Rails is a rapidly moving, open source, web development framework, and keeping up to speed with it is a big task. You might have already built applications using it, but there have been significant changes in the syntax and semantic of the Rails framework in the latest upgrade. Upgrading applications needs an approach that not only helps the upgrade, but also helps to improve on what has already been built, so that it performs even better.

Presenting a practical approach to upgrading your knowledge for Rails 4, this guide shows you how to build the most popular types of applications using Rails 4, and highlights new ways to do things. The book also closely follows lots of the best practices, gems, and popular solutions already known to the community, and tracks the changes in these based on Version 4 of Rails. This book brings new ideas to refactor and restructure code to make it perform better in production, and enables you to write production-ready code.

The book starts off with relatively simple application, demonstrating the new application structure, the testing framework, and several day-to-day tasks. The complexity of applications will increase with each chapter.

In the first half of the book, you will learn to build a recipe sharing website, a conference and RSVP management application, an online Pinboard similar to Pinterest, a SaaS-based application, and a customizable content management system demonstrating concepts. In the later half, you will get to know MongoDB by building an analytics dashboard using MongoDB and Rails. You will also create a mash-up of some common APIs such as Google Maps and Twitter and make them work with one another. One of the new features we will look at in this book is an API-only application with no frontend. At the end of the book, you will learn how to use HTML5 concepts to your advantage and extend the Rails framework with reusable engines.

This book is designed to update, upgrade, and improve your knowledge of Rails 4, as well as your applications.

Table of Contents

Project 1: A Social Recipe-sharing Website
Project 2: Conference and Event RSVP Management
Project 3: Creating an Online Social Pinboard
Project 4: Creating a Restaurant Menu Builder
Project 5: Building a Customizable Content Management System
Project 6: Creating an Analytics Dashboard using Rails and Mongoid
Project 7: Creating an API Mashup – Twitter and Google Maps
Project 8: API Only Application – Backend for a Mobile App
Project 9: Video Streaming Website using Rails and HTML5
Project 10: A Rails Engines-based E-Commerce Platform