#railslite

Topics

Web Application Frameworks

Web Servers

HTTP Responses

HTTP Requests

Regex

Assessment 4 - Authentication / MVC Test

Projects

RailsLite - building the functionality of Rails from scratch

Developing a deep understanding of Rails & Web Application Frameworks in general

Rack::Response & Rack::Request

Solo day

Learnings

Repetitive debugging on the practice assessment for A4 definitely paid off - I feel like I understand/remember the solutions to various debugging/syntactical/structural errors I hit when creating the Rails app much better than other errors I've hit in work & personal projects. Recreating the same project over and over again and running into different & similar errors definitely reinforces debugging skills & improves the ability to read/comprehend errors and their source.

Interesting thing to note - the previous cohort had said that Assessment 4 was the most difficult, and required pure memorization. They also implied that the most people failed this assessment. The final results:

Median score: 46/46

Average score: 44/46

Passing score: 42/44

There was less wiggle room as compared to previous assessments, but it seems that because of the difficulty, more people studied harder and got perfect scores.

Or there was less room for error on the exam itself, as one error tended to cause 5+ specs to fail rather than just one spec at a time

Regex

https://regex101.com/ - nice place to test your Regex expressions

'string' =~ /regex_exp/ - will return the index of the beginning of the matched regex. Will return nil if there is no match

match_data = "string".match(/regex_exp/) - will return a MatchData object if a match is found

match_data[0] - will return the matched portion of the string

match_data[1] - will return any captured substrings, if included in regex

match_data = nil if no match

Today I Learned: about JavaScript basics.

Today was an odd day. We did not have a lecture; however, we did have bagels. We had another solo day as we worked on finishing up our Rails Lite project and ActiveRecord project. These exercises were meant to demystify the magic of Rails and help us gain a better understanding of the underpinnings of Rails.

We finished up with our Rails curriculum today and are now proficient in Rails. With that, we will begin the next portion of the curriculum - JavaScript.

Short post today. To sum up, we worked on completing Rails Lite. I had the time to go back and tackle ActiveRecord Lite and am close to finishing it. I’m probably going to get back to it right now after I post this, and plan to tacking the bonuses Rails Lite when I get the chance.

Tomorrow

We’re learning Javascript tonight and working on it tomorrow. We’re expected to know javascript as well as we knew Ruby the first day we started here.

I love Rails. I love it because it deals with all the things that makes you want to pull your hair out. I love a good challenge, and today, like ActiveRecord Lite, was the most challenging.

Project

Building everything from the ground up. I realize Rails has made me spoiled. From using WEBrick, adding controller functionality to render templates, adding sessions, routes, and params, oh params. However, that’s what makes it much more interesting. It’s going to be a lot of work to get this project how I want it to be, but I’m excited for the result.

Tomorrow

We’re continuing the rest of it. Also, we’re having bagels and coffee in the morning and roll call will be a bit later than usual because of it. So I’m going to take the time tonight to finish as much as I can of Rails Lite and organize my past projects to push up to Github.

Today was a pretty cool day, partly because it was a solo day (which means I can use my own environment!) and partly because we wrote our own version of Rails. A Lite(TM) version, to be clear.

I think the main reason this is a great project to do is so you can truly get a grasp on what is going on under the hood of Rails, allowing you to know what you're doing. This seems to be a common theme at AppAcademy--teach the fundamentals, without abstractions, so you can deeply understand what you're doing. I love this approach, because I love knowing the inner-workings of what I'm dealing with.

I finished the project around 4 today, and tomorrow is another full day of working on it, so I wonder what that means for me.

Anyways, one little piece of code I found neat today was just a simple way to create a Hash from two arrays. I'm a big fan of Ruby's array methods, such as 'zip'. As such, I enjoy finding cases where it's appropriate to use them. On to the code!

def run(req, res)   md = req.path.match(pattern)   params = Hash[md.names.zip(md.captures)]   controller = controller_class.new(req, res, params)   controller.invoke_action(action_name) end

A few interesting things are happening here:

By using RegExp captures, we can create a 2D array simply by zipping the MatchData.names to MatchData.captures,

Building the routing system was actually quite simple. Each of these projects are so enjoyable. After completing a basic rails assessment this morning covering user, post and tagging system, we spent the balance of they day knocking out Routing and some URL helper functionality.

Another solo day! Rails is so awesome. people far smarter than I have solved so many difficult problems and have provided insanely convenient ways to accomplish common tasks.

Today I spent a lot of time writing and rewriting a parser to take in paramaters in the form common to POST bodys and query strings.

consider the case where the query string contains user[name]=bob&user[email]=bobs_email