School Archives

Reinventing the Wheel…

…using a wheel. Ha.

After the longest assessment we’ve ever had (2 hours!) this morning, we continued on to RailsLite, aka our introduction to handling server requests/responses. All I can say is that after just 1 day of it, I’m glad the Rails guys blazed that trail for me, haha. Even with several layers of abstraction built in already (Ruby, WEBrick, and some of the Rails functions), things that seemed simple before suddenly required serious thought. For example, parsing parameter hashes. Sure, the straightforward params[key] = value pairing was simple enough, but once you add in multiple layers of nesting ( params[key1][key2].[key_x] = value ), how to construct the proper nested hash?
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DiscoverIT

To continue with my series of really terribly named Rail projects, we made a RedditLite spinoff called DiscoverIt. (Can you believe it actually took a thesaurus to come up with that awful name?) The project itself was relatively straightforward until the end, but afforded good practice with setting up a shell of a site, complete with user sessions, ability to submit/edit/remove content, etc. The “cross-posting” feature was a cool new thing in that it introduced us to yet another amazing ActiveRecord feature, the ability to not only auto-populate foreign keys, but even create rows in many-to-many tables, based purely on associations. Once again, I didn’t really think it would work, but why do I ever doubt ActiveRecord?

CatRecords =^v^=

For all your feline listening needs! Actually I should have done that instead of lamely choosing real bands and songs. Then I probably would have spent most of my day coming up with horribly punny and/or childish cat songs instead of trying to get a dynamically generated site navigation bar up, which was how my day was actually spent.
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