Laying out the flow of an application - where to start?

rubyonrails-talk
1

I have a question regarding where to start with a particular app I’m building. Hoping someone can set me on the right path. The scenario is pretty straight forward.

This is the hierarchy of info:

States

Towns

Each state has many Towns

Each town has the following pages associated with it.

  • profile
  • geography
  • population
  • demographics
  • leaders
  • budget
  • history
  • recycling
  • maps Part of my issue, due to lack of experience, is really where to start. I’m trying to learn what I should be doing first when starting a new project. I’m not sure exactly what should be models. I think my biggest confusion, is how to handle the subpages. I want the RESTful urls to be www.example.com/state/town/profile/geography and so on.
2

If you have this structure in mind, why not write a test for that and go from there? e.g. an rspec request test like

    it "responds to /california/idyllwild/profile/geography" do       get "/california/idyllwild/profile/geography"       response.status.should be(200)     end

(You could use cucumber or some other framework, of course.)

Start with some reasonable model name - Town, Place, Location - and see how that fits as you add tests describing what the app does.

HTH,