Professional Ruby on Rails™

1.1. A Good Place to Start

The sample application that drives this book is called Soups OnLine, your Web 2.0 guide to all things hot and broth-y. As the site develops, it will have all sorts of modern web goodness, including an Ajax interface, social networking and content development, RSS syndication, and fancy graphics. For the moment, though, all it has is the standard Rails application structure, which you should see in your command window after you execute the following command:

rails -d mysql soupsonline

If you leave off the -d mysql, then your application will be created to use SQLite3, which is the new Rails default. The database can be changed later in developemnt. In response, Rails will create a standard application structure:

create
create  app/controllers
create  app/helpers
create  app/models

[... several creations skipped ...]

create  log/server.log
create  log/production.log
create  log/development.log
create  log/test.log

The examples in this book were written and tested against Ruby 1.8.6 and Rails 2.0.2. Ruby 1.9 has not been released as of this writing, but is expected shortly.