CSC321.01 2016F, Class 05: A Static Site ======================================== _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.