Most Ruby on Rails books and tutorials, or at least all the ones I have read, start with a simple application with modest requirements and show how to create and migrate the database and how to generate a scaffold based UI.
This is all well and good, but when I try to move beyond scaffold to the web application UI that I want, I quickly find myself mired in a swamp up to my eye-balls.
Or, to mangle another metaphor, working though the examples and tutorials is like watching a magic show, but I need to figure out how the tricks work.
What I am trying to create (as a learning exercise and not a paying gig, thank God!) is yet again another ToDo list application with some very non-scaffold like elements including: 1. A two columns welcome screen with login on the left and register in the right. Successful completion of either of these leads to ... 2. A three column working screen with the user's ToDo items organized as a tree on the left, a list of the ToDo items under the selected element in the center, and an always open form on the right that can be used to add or edit ToDo items at any time. I will eventually use JavaScript to set the initial focus on the first field in this form. 3. In general, all lists will be of incomplete items in inverse order by priority where priority is not a field in the database but rather computed from other fields in the record. 4. Complete page refreshes for now, but eventually AJAXed.
So far, I keep bumping up against redirects that don't redirect or redirects that do work, but display the layout for where I came from instead of where I went to.
Clearly, there's stuff going on that I didn't fully internalize by working through the examples. I come from Java/Swing background where I wrote all the glue code that help the various API calls together and I bring zero experience to this kind of framework, where the man behind the curtain reaches out and runs little snippets of code I write, code I didn't have to write, or code that gets generated based on hints that I configure into the code (has_many, acts_like_tree, etc.).
To mange a final metaphor, I'm finding it heavy sledding.
What I would love to find is a walk-though of a RoR application describing how and why the flow of control is transferred between Controllers (including helpers), Models, and Views (including Layouts and Partials). I would also love to know how render and redirect calls effect (and don't effect this process) and how stuff gets into and goes out of scope.
Does anyone have any suggestions where I might find a document of this nature?
