I’ve finally gotten around to finishing the basic design on the Broadband affiliate site project I’ve had ongoing for a while and figured it would be nice to have a backend to add/remove, de-activate all the different packages etc. So, I decided to go crazy and have a look at Ruby on Rails.
Now I’m not extremely well versed with patterns and so on, but I have a decent understanding of the MVC style architecture that seems to be popular these days and I’ve seen a few tutorials on Symfony, a PHP 5 web framework which I believe is fairly similar in nature to Rails, so I figured I’d get along okay. I feel I was pretty right, in a few hours over today and yesterday I’ve come out with a working database driven website and administration area running on Ruby on Rails.
Running Gentoo, I always try and use the portage package management tool, to be double sure on what I needed to do I had a little search on google which led me to this page, and these commands.
echo "dev-ruby/rails mysql fastcgi" >> /etc/portage/package.use
emerge -av rails
rails /path/to/app
That all went well and I was sat looking at a clean rails application. I fired up the builtin webserver, WEBrick, it worked, so I closed it again. Seeing as I use Apache on all my servers, I wanted to use it for the development aswell. I’ve never used FastCGI before, but what do you know there was an example virtual host definition in the rails README file.
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName rails
DocumentRoot /path/application/public/
ErrorLog /path/application/log/server.log
<Directory /path/application/public/>
Options ExecCGI FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride all
Allow from all
Order allow,deny
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>
Once again, this worked a treat. I then set about creating my application, which by enlarge went along without many flaws, using a combination of the excellent Rails API, this Create a weblog in 15 minutes screencast and Rolling with Ruby on Rails as guidance. The biggest problem I had was creating initially trying to create the scaffolds. Not knowing RoR’s naming conventions, I’d foolishly named my database tables in the singular form, ie provider rather than providers. After overcoming this, I rolled on pretty nicely.
Using this page as guidance I used the login_generator to create a simple admin area, and the scaffolding stuff filled most of the admin pages for me, just a few tweaks here and there were required. The public face was even easier, basically allowing a few different ways to filter the list of broadband packages through one action, ‘list’.
As far as the language Ruby itself goes, I’ve barely learnt anything, basically because Rails does it all for me. The most complicated things I did code wise, was using a case statement to change the filtering on the public packages page and this simple function for turning bytes into a more readable form.
def human_readable(number)
count = 0
while number/1024 > 1
number = number/1024
count += 1
end
iec = ['', 'K', 'M', 'G', 'T']
return number.to_s + iec[count]
end
My only gripe with this so far, is the speed. It does take forever to generate these simple pages, the built in webserver does seem to be a shade quicker, but I’d still rather use apache. I’m sure there’ll be some tweaks I can make to speed the FastCGI module up, but there’s no rush for that now.
Hopefully I’ll signup for a few affiliate programs and launch the site properly within the next few days, I don’t expect to make a fortune but it’s been a good little learning utility so far and I hope to use it to learn a few things about affiliate marketing.
