w5d2 - All of the Lites

    Today we started tying up the Rails section of the curriculum with an assessment, aimed at testing our knowledge of putting together a basic web app. It mostly revolved around user authentication, and using sessions to handle logged in users. By now, I feel pretty comfortable with all of that, and the assessment went down without a fight. Once we were all done, we moved on to the last piece of the curriculum.

    The Rails curriculum started last week with learning SQL and then constructing a lite version of ActiveRecord, which gave us a glimpse at how Rails handles Models behind the scenes. It’s only fitting that we end with trying to put together the rest of Rails, with Rails Lite. This entails trying to reconstruct the way that Views and Controllers function. Everything seems to be driven by the server, which sends down an HTTP Request and expects an HTTP Response. Rails takes that response, parses it in a way that make it useful to developers (we’ve mostly used the “params” method, which returns a hash of specific parameters that were included in the request), decides what process to hand it off to, and then sends back the final response. To me, this is probably the most magical part of Rails, and that makes it a bit harder to understand. There is a LOT going on under the hood, and it can get confusing pretty quickly, but I think by the end of the day tomorrow, I should have a pretty good handle on some of the black magic that Rails likes to practice.