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Ruby runs on Rails with NetBeans

Build a web application in minutes

Next, we want to wire this up to a web page that allows us to add, edit and delete entries (which we'll refer to as posts) to this database. For that we need a Controller. Again, right click Linkshare, select Generate and this time use the drop-down menu to select Controller. Enter a value of Post for the Name field and then OK. This generates a Ruby file called post_controller.rb, which opens in the editor.

We add a single line of code to the skeleton so that it looks like this:


class PostController < ApplicationController
  scaffold :link
end

The final thing is to make sure that requests are routed to the correct place, so edit the routes.rb file (which is under the Configuration > Environments node of the Linkshare project tree). Adding the following line should route requests to the post controller:


map.connect ' ', :controller => "link"

With that in place, press F6 (or click on the big green Run Main Project button on the main tool bar) and launch the WEBrick web server with our Ruby on Rails application in place. Opening a browser and entering the URL http://localhost:3000/post will take us to a very basic looking web page that enables us to add, edit, list and delete posts.

Want to do more? Say, we decide to add a tags field so we have an idea what each URL is about. Easy. In the NetBeans Generator, menu select Migration, enter "new_tags_field" and then hit OK. This creates a new class called 002_new_tags_field.rb and opens the file in the editor. We'll make use of one of NetBeans keyboard triggers to make life simple for us. Enter a new line under def self.up, then enter mcol and then press the tab key. This expands to:


add_column :table, :column, :string

Change this to:

add_column :links, :tags, :string

Save the change, run the Migrate Database command to add a new tags field to the links table. Hit Refresh in the browser, click on the New Link button and, hey presto, there's a tags field as well.

It might not look like much, but we have the skeleton of a useful web application, created in just a few minutes. Enhancing the application with validations, adding new fields or functions (like voting buttons), or adding some better formatting can all be done with a few key strokes or mouse clicks.

It's why Ruby on Rails has made such a splash, and shows how well Ruby on Rails has been integrated into NetBeans.®

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