Professional Ruby on Rails™

1.2. A Recipe for Recipes

There are two useful places to start when planning a Rails application:

• You can start from the front-end and move backwards by thinking about what actions or activities your users will perform in the site.

• You can start from the back-end and move forwards by thinking about what kind of data you will need to be storing.

The two directions feed back and forth on each other, of course, and there's no particularly correct way to go about site design. Rails is extremely good at supporting incremental development, so starting in one small place and gradually increasing functionality is a perfectly valid design process.

For the purposes of the book, I'd like to start with a brief description of user activities, but work in earnest with the initial data structure and administrative side, catching up with the user activities in future chapters. For me, at least, since Rails is so good at quick-and-easy data creation support, it feels more direct to start with that part, get some quick success under my belt, and then start designing the front end with some actual data to look at.

So, here's a quick description of user activities. Soups OnLine is intended to start as a recipe repository, where users can upload recipes, find recipes that match various categories or criteria, and comment on recipes. More advanced uses might include the capability to make and receive recommendations, information about various techniques or ingredients, and the capability to purchase ...