Ajax: Creating Web Pages with Asynchronous JavaScript and XML

Chapter 13. Traveling with Ruby on Rails Mention the subject of Ajax, and within five minutes somebody will bring up Ruby on Rails. Just as with Ajax, Ruby on Rails has become a winning phrase in corporate buzzword bingo. It is kind of sad t...

13.1. What Is Ruby on Rails? A single word in the English language, in my opinion, sums up what Ruby on Rails is: synergy. Just in case you're unaware of the meaning of the word synergy, it roughly means that the whole is greater than the sum of...

13.2. Installation This entire preamble leads to the two important questions of where to get Ruby and where to get Rails. That's easy. A simple Google search for "ruby rails" is enough to answer both questions simultaneously. I do recomm...

13.3. A Little Ruby on Rails Warm-Up As stated previously, Ruby is the object-oriented programming language, and Rails is the framework used to develop applications. Let's say, for example, that I want to create a mad scientist application using R...

13.4. A Problem Revisited Now that I've got some kind of idea (yeah, right) of what I'm doing with Ruby on Rails, the next question is how to use it in an application. The first task is to identify exactly what I want to do. For example, let's say...

13.5. Whither Ajax? Considering the number of goodies built into the Rails API, finding exactly where the Ajax functionality is hidden could take a little work. However, because I'm really crumby at keeping secrets, I'll spill the beans; everythin...

13.6. Summary In this chapter, we covered some of the history of Ruby on Rails, including the fact that Ruby on Rails is separated into Ruby and Rails. From there, we covered the process of installing Ruby and then installing Rails and viewing t...