Early in the new year I made the switch to Vim from Textmate. I needed a lot of practice so I replicated the Rails screen-cast for a blog in 15 minutes produced by Ryan Bates over and over again. It was a great way to get familiar with Vim after years of Textmate editing. I wrote up a script based on that screen-cast to aid my practice, and I have also found it useful in quickly demoing Rails to a newbie. The script itself won’t make sense without viewing the screen-cast, but a good reminder of the steps if you find yourself in the same situation.
- Create a new rails application
- Start and verify server is running
- Generate Post (title, body) scaffold
- Demonstrate adding, updating Posts
- Add validation rule to Post
- Demonstrate adding an invalid post
- Refactor posts/show view into partial
- Refactor posts/index to use partial
- Demonstrate in browser
- Demonstrate XML (curl http://localhost:3000/posts.xml)
- Add JSON format for Posts
- Demonstrate JSON (curl http://localhost:3000/posts.json)
- Add atom format (posts/index.atom.builder)
- Add auto_discover_link_tag to layout
- Add basic authentication to PostsController
- Demonstrate in browser
- Add Comment scaffold (body)
- Don’t forget to update routes
- Demonstrate routes (rake route)
- Add list of comments to posts/show
- Create comments partial
- Add comments form to posts/show
- Clear out CommentsController
- Add create action (but use #build instead of #create!)
- Create does not save, show off debugger
- Demonstrating save comment in debugger
- Change build method to #create!
- Update comments form to use AJAX
- Update comments controller to use AJAX
- Demonstrate fall back without Javascript enabled
- Create automated test for posting comments
- Review with broken test
- Review console by updating a post title, add comment
Here are the various 15 minute blog screen-casts for the different versions of Rails:
