Overview

• Preliminaries.
  • Admin.
  • Upcoming Work.
  • Extra Credit.
  • Questions.
• Reflections on chapters 1-3.
• Testing.
• Starting our primary application.

Preliminaries

Admin

• We now have a class mentor. Welcome to Sooji Son, who will be with us on Mondays and Fridays, and will also set up an evening hour.
• I think I now have all of the EdX stuff up. (Fingers crossed.)
• I apologize to those of you who, like me, are red-green color deficient.
• How far did you get on chapter 3?
• How are we doing on homework time?
• How many of you used JUnit?

Upcoming Work

• Finish the Rails Tutorial Chapter 3 work.
• SaaSbook: Chapter 1 and sections 10.1-10.2, 7.1, 7.3-7.4
  • Chapter 1 and those sections of Chapter 10 are in week 1
  • Chapter 7 is in week 4
• Watch at least one SaaSbook video (only the video, no distractors, notebook and writing utensil in hand)
• 10pm Tuesday: Reading Journal (on SaaSbook)
  • Message subject: CSC 321 Journal for Day 6 (Your Name)
  • Summarize in a sentence: How is the agile approach different from the plan-and-document approach?
  • What surprised you the most in the SaaSbook material? Why?
  • What are you most excited to learn more about later in the semester? Why?
  • What point confused you the most? Try to explain it in your own words.

Good Things to Do

• CS Table Tuesday: Passwords and more. (Handouts on Charlie's door.)
• Convo, September 8 (Thursday, 11:00 a.m., JRC 101): Roberto Gonzales on "From Undocumented to DACAmented: Understanding Legal Status in a New Policy Context".
  
  • Get a free copy of his book Lives in Limbo: Undocumented and Coming of Age in America by visiting Macy 203 during regular office times.
• Learning from Alumni Thursday: The Job Board Doctor
• CS Extras Thursday: PM on PL
• AppDev Recruiting Event, Thursday, 5:30 p.m. (after extra).
• SHACS is offering Question, Persuade, & Refer (QPR) training for students, faculty, and staff – this is suicide prevention training run by a national institute. They’re first holding one session with a cap of 30 people for September 13th in ARH 120 from 11 – 12 noon. Email Toby if you're interested.

Questions

Reflections on chapters 1-3

What have you learned so far about Rails and about Rails development?

• Write down three important things that you'd tell to someone new to Rails development (or at least newer than you).
• Share with neighbors.
• Share with class.

Answers

• There's this magic wand called "scaffolding" that sets everything up for you, but it's a PITN because you have no idea yet what has been set up.
  • You still have to do additional work. It's not a magic be-all do-all.
  • Over the long term, you'll find that scaffolding can make you more efficient, but it requires that you understand what the scaffold makes.
• MVC frameworks. Model/View/Controller. Explains workflow of how data flows through the program.
  • Model: Underlying representation of the data. (Model files; database.)
  • View: What the user sees. For static pages, there's a file for each, written in erb, which is an extended version of HTML. (We can also describe views in other ways. For example, the controller can specify a view, rather than relying on a file.)
  • Controller: Talks to the model and view and pulls everything together. Most of the application logic. Methods of what you can do/have access to. Inherits from the ApplicationController class.
• Growth mindset: It may seem like there are fifteen different languages and tools to learn, but you can do it!
• Ruby: You can come at problems from different angles.
• Organize and refactor your code.
• Rails development requires a whole ecosystem of tools and services
  • Rails
  • Rails gems
  • Version control (with GitHub and Bitbucket)
  • HTML and a bit of HTTP
  • Ruby
  • erb
  • Difference between development and deployment
  • How to deploy
  • Installing software
  • New vocabulary (and some weird customs on how vocabulary is used)
  • "Custom over configuration!"
  • Cloud 9
  • Running servers on virtual machines
• Complicated file trees ("custom")

Testing

What is testing? (If you've read chapter 3, how does the testing in chapter 3 relate to the other testing you've done?)

• Trying lots of "cases" with the code you've written. If all of the cases check out, you're good to go. Ideally, these tests are run automatically, rather than manually.
• Requires that you think carefully about inputs and outputs, at least when you're dealing with traditional functions.
• Manual testing can be time consuming.
  
  • Have to run code.
  • Have to watch the results to make sure that they are correct.
  • Have to remember/think about what tests to do.
  • Humans aren't good at reading results, and may even type inputs differently.
• Manual testing is usually less exhaustive.
  • Since it's time consuming to manually test, we may do fewer tests.
  • If we write them down and can run them automatically, we're likely to write more tests.
  • You can write loops for automated testing.
• Good tests reveal problems, often at the place it happens, rather than elsewhere.
• Good tests let you update your code and quickly make sure that everything continues to work fine. (That is, that you didn't break anything.)
• Real programmers write tests.
• Debate: Test-Driven Development
  • Write tests and run the program.
  • Expect it to fail.
  • Fix it for that test.
  • And then go back and do it again.
• Alternate: Develop multiple tests. Then write code. Then refine.
• Testing is a natural part of the Ruby/Rails universe.

What kind of tests would you write for a Web app?

• All the pages that are supposed to load, load.
• All the controls on every page work in the way that they are supposed to. (Hard for highly-interactive pages.)
• System can handle the load.
• Errors when the user does something wrong.
• Access is appropriately limited.
• Data manipulation: When the user does this, the database now contains (or does not contain) this.

Starting our primary application

Work on chapter 3.