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PORuby on Rails -- not grokking
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copied!<p>I've been learning a lot about web technologies recently and I want to put together a neat little website to play with html, css, javascript, flash, and what have you. </p> <p>I know that as far as the web browser is concerned all I need to do is send a text file (usually HTML) from my server using HTTP over TCP. </p> <p>I've gone through a couple of Rails tutorials by now but I am having a lot of trouble getting things to work and understanding how the components work together even if I could get it to work by blindly following said tutorials to the letter.</p> <p>I think I understand the MVC concept. Obviously the business model of an application makes sense to be kept separate from the view implementation, etc. Sure, that's fine. From what I understand RoR needs (?) a database. Sure, when my website grows to a point where I need to track customers and crunch data, I will want that. </p> <p>But where do I get at the actual functionality? Where do I specify how my server responds to requests from browsers? Shouldn't this be straightforward? Do I need to set up a database just to get my "hello world" page up? </p> <p>I think what might be happening is that Rails is designed to do something that I don't need (yet?). It does many things for me that I don't understand, and in order for me to be comfortable I would have to dig through a lot of material to figure it out. </p> <p>What brought me to this point is, I am looking for the "next step" after this little server I was playing with: </p> <pre><code>require 'socket' server = TCPServer.open(8080) loop { Thread.start(server.accept) do |client| client.puts(Time.now.ctime) # server sends dynamic page consisting of current time client.flush while (str = client.gets) do puts "recvd >> "+str # show what server gets from client if str.chop.length == 0 then break end # detect end of transmission end puts "done" client.close end } </code></pre> <p>This little bit of code is more than halfway there to what I need it to do. I got stuck on something pretty silly. I still don't know how to just take a file on disk and send it to the client. I figure i'd open a stream to the requested file and pipe it over to the socket... No idea how to do that in ruby. So I figured, hey, maybe Rails'll do it for me.</p> <p>Now I follow a bunch of directions, finally get the server running on mongrel, and I try this: <code>ruby script\generate controller MyTest</code> and still get a "Routing Error" when I open it up in the browser. I get a giant ugly stack trace on the cmdline. Screw this!</p> <p>Clearly I should be taking a class that will show me how to use Rails and more importantly, whether or not it is overkill for my purposes. So... should I keep trying to figure it out? If so, can someone show me a good tutorial, or explain to me why the tutorials I have seen aren't helping me? </p> <p>Should I just try to use EventMachine to make my server? I just want to make a nice simple fast web server. </p> <p>Thanks for reading. :)</p>

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