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Merb Way, The

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Merb Way, The

Book

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Description

  • Copyright 2009
  • Edition: 1st
  • Book
  • ISBN-10: 0-321-60638-8
  • ISBN-13: 978-0-321-60638-9

“Foy is a gifted writer and his descriptions of the philosophies that( impacted the design and implementation of Merb are definitely useful to( everyone affected by the changes in Rails 3.”

–Obie Fernandez, Series Editor

The Expert Guide to Building Merb Applications

Thousands of Ruby and Rails developers are discovering the extraordinary scalability, agility, flexibility, and performance offered by the new Merb MVC framework. The Merb Way is the first comprehensive guide to using, extending, and deploying Merb. Like the bestseller The Rails Way (Addison-Wesley, 2008), this book can either be read cover-to-cover as a tutorial or used for modular coverage that makes it an ideal task reference. Foy Savas systematically covers everything developers need to know to build production-quality Merb applications, offering detailed code examples for jumpstarting virtually any project.

Savas is not only involved in the Merb project as an open source contributor: He uses Merb every day as a professional developer. Drawing on his extensive practical expertise, he delves deeply into the Merb framework’s architecture and source code, revealing its elegance and offering powerful best practices for using it. To maximize this book’s practical value, he also covers the tools most widely used alongside Merb, including the DataMapper ORM, the RSpec tester (and associated behavior-driven development techniques), and several leading Merb plugins.

The Merb Way will help you

  • Master Merb innovations that will be incorporated into Rails 3
  • Understand the fundamentals of Merb development, one step at a time
  • Use Merb’s sophisticated application router to guide incoming requests
  • Explore the Merb stack, master its configuration options, and dive into its internals
  • Use Merb controllers to integrate application code, handle responses, and manage sessions, filters, and exceptions
  • Build templates with both ERB (Erubis) and HAML
  • Use the DataMapper ORM to represent object properties and behaviors
  • Learn best practices for RESTful development with Merb
  • Leverage Helpers to simplify many common development tasks
  • Refactor code, encapsulate it in gems, and share it across multiple applications
  • Customize the responses your application sends to each user
  • Gain a deep, practical understanding of Merb plugins and extensibility
  • Authenticate users with Merb’s modular authentication plugin
  • Configure, generate, describe, and test Merb mailers
  • Use the merb-parts gem to create component-like regions on Web pages
  • Cache content to relieve stress on Web servers
  • Make the most of Behavior Driven Development and testing with RSpec

Extras

Author's Site

Please visit the author's site at themerbway.com.

Sample Content

Online Sample Chapter

The Merb Way: Models

Sample Pages

Download the sample pages (includes Chapter 5 and Index)

Table of Contents

Foreword xix

Acknowledgments xxi

Merb pastie xxiii

Introduction xxvii

About the author xxxi

Chapter 1: Fundamentals 1

1.1 Generating a new application 1

1.2 The layout of a Merb application 2

1.3 Interactive Merb 9

1.4 Merb configuration 12

1.5 Understanding the Merb stack 20

1.6 An overview of Merb internals 27

1.7 Conclusion 35

Chapter 2: Routing 37

2.1 How Merb routing works 38

2.2 Router configuration 43

2.3 Checking routes 45

2.4 Match rules 50

2.5 Registering routes 54

2.6 Other route settings 57

2.7 Resource routes 60

2.8 Conclusion 64

Chapter 3: Controllers 65

3.1 From request to controller 65

3.2 The controller classes 68

3.3 Custom controller classes 75

3.4 Filters 79

3.5 Redirects 84

3.6 Exceptions 87

3.7 Rendering templates 89

3.8 run_later 97

3.9 Sending and streaming 97

3.10 Conclusion 99

Chapter 4: Views 101

4.1 ERB 101

4.2 Haml 105

4.3 Merb view templates 109

4.4 Partials 111

4.5 Conclusion 112

Chapter 5: Models 113

5.1 Configuration 113

5.2 Model classes 115

5.3 Properties 118

5.4 Associations 132

5.5 CRUD basics 140

5.6 Hooks 154

5.7 Plugins 155

5.8 Conclusion 165

Chapter 6: Helpers 167

6.1 Truncate helper 167

6.2 Numeric helpers 168

6.3 Date and time helpers 171

6.4 Cycle helper 176

6.5 Tag helpers 177

6.6 Form helpers 179

6.7 Conclusion 192

Chapter 7: Slices 193

7.1 Slice development 193

7.2 Slice usage 201

7.3 Conclusion 203

Chapter 8: Sessions 205

8.1 How sessions work 205

8.2 Configuration 206

8.3 Storing sessions 207

8.4 Request access 219

8.5 Controller access 220

8.6 Conclusion 220

Chapter 9: Authentication 221

9.1 Auth core 221

9.2 Auth more 237

9.3 Auth password slices 245

9.4 Conclusion 251

Chapter 10: Mailers 253

10.1 Configuration 253

10.2 Using mailers directly 255

10.3 Mail controllers 257

10.4 Testing 261

10.5 Generation 261

10.6 Conclusion 262

Chapter 11: Parts 263

11.1 Parts controllers 263

11.2 Invoking actions 266

11.3 Generation 267

11.4 Conclusion 267

Chapter 12: Caching 269

12.1 Configuration 269

12.2 Caching basics 271

12.3 Caching helpers 274

12.4 Conclusion 278

Chapter 13: Testing 279

13.1 Rake tasks 279

13.2 Spec files 282

13.3 Model specs 283

13.4 Request specs 285

13.5 Request helper 289

13.6 Request matchers 290

13.7 RSpec extensions 292

13.8 Miscellaneous extensions 294

13.9 Conclusion 295

Afterword 297

Index 299

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