As challenging and and sobering as the last 10 months have been, I survived to tell the tale. That being said, joining Flatiron School is one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. The chance to work on challenging material and develop new skills with like-minded people will go down as one of the best memories of my life. I learned a ton of programming concepts, languages and skills, but more importantly, I learned a lot about myself.
As we develop our frontend web applications, we will soon notice that we have an unruly mess of state, props and components. Keeping track of this mess is the goal of Redux, and can be encapsulated by the idea of a “single source of truth”. This refers to the idea that all of an application’s data should be stored in a single object, and any component that needs to refer to it can, simply by being connected to it. So how does it work?
In this article, we will discuss how to set up Ruby on Rails to be used strictly as an API. Why would someone want to do this? By default, when a new project is created in Rails, view files are set up that will render html that relates to actions in a controller. This is a good default. However, when we are interested in creating our own front end work separately from rails, we can set up our project as an API. This will forego the creation of view files. Instead, we will be rendering json objects from our controller, which will be sent over to be rendered and used on our front end. To get started, let’s create a new rails project, with one noticeable difference.
This is the first in a two-part series in which we will learn how to create a shopping cart from scratch with Ruby on Rails. Fundamental knowledge of Ruby and Ruby on Rails, in particular migrations, CRUD resources, different kinds of variables, blocks, etc is assumed, in order to quickly get to the primary focal points of the article. More advanced features of these topics, such as up and down methods for migrations, will be explained in detail. In Part I, we will be setting up our models, views and controllers, as well as the activerecord relationships between these models. We will also incorporate sessions in order to keep track of our current cart. In Part II, we will run some more advanced migrations as well as introduce AJAX and ActionCable in order to provide realtime updates to our cart, and thus enhance the user experience. Also, we will incorporate security measures to ensure that only a cart that belongs to a particular user can be created or altered.
Sessions and cookies are key concepts that must be understood in order to build secure web applications. They are the tools that help us identify our users and restrict information access based on user identity. This is a quick introduction into how to safely secure a web application using sessions.