modernizing my rails chops

I got aboard the rails train last year with my first project and made the decision to not go the RESTful route since it didnt seem necessary at the time and many of the tutorials and books had been written before this was The Way.

Now, there seem to be 2 things that I feel I'm falling behind on: 1) Restful-ness, and 2) Rails 2.x (that first big project is still on Rails 1.2.5).

So, having spotted (and somewhat ignored) a number of postings, tutorials, and books that can guide me on getting up-to-date, I thought I'd ask here for pointers to the ones that people feel did a good job of educating and guiding the transitions necessary to get in synch with the latest.

I should also say that I'm about to start a couple new projects, so those give me a clean slate to begin with... I'd also be interested in transitioning my current large project, so if anybody has tips about moving an existing project in these directions, that'll help too.

Thanks in advance.

lunaclaire wrote:

I got aboard the rails train last year with my first project and made the decision to not go the RESTful route since it didnt seem necessary at the time and many of the tutorials and books had been written before this was The Way.

Now, there seem to be 2 things that I feel I'm falling behind on: 1) Restful-ness, and 2) Rails 2.x (that first big project is still on Rails 1.2.5).

Just take a look at REST and RSPEC. It's all fairly straightforward, and is mostly about to make you approach in a more organised way controllers and testing.

install rspec_on_rails

ruby script/plugin install http://rspec.rubyforge.org/svn/trunk/rspec_on_rails/

then generate an rspec_resource

ruby script/generate rspec_scaffold test_resource

look at what it gives you...

a whole load of rspec tests and a restful controller...

boom

give it a go.

Working through this Rails 2 blog tutorial (parts 1 and 2) will overview some of the features for you. I found this fun as well.

Thanks, guys.

I just finished reading the following on RESTful Rails and found it useful:

http://www.b-simple.de/download/restful_rails_en.pdf

Check github for latest installation instructions for different versions of rails-

http://wiki.github.com/dchelimsky/rspec/rails

Gems are now the recommended installation mechanism unless running from edge (as described on github and the RSpec beta book).

Regards,

Nick