Helper methods in a rails app help us to be more abstract as programmers, and consequently more precise. For example, In a simple user authenification system, there are many different points at which you might want to check that a user is logged in. You can check if a user… »
We all know that Ruby objects are actually alive (or at least Rubyists tend to treat our objects as if they were). At certain points in our object's life cycle, accordingly, we may want to automatically trigger certain actions. This is where the callback feature of Active Record… »
I was going to start this post with a clever reference to Sinatra and how he was such a 'cool cat' but I sort of winced as I started typing that out so I'll skip it. Anyway...this week at Flatiron, we've started to… »
This past week at Flatiron has introduced us to ORMs--databases wrapped in Ruby--and to Active Record (just a bit though!). One source of confusion among me and my classmates has been the basic relationship between the database and the actual objects created by the Ruby program. In order to help… »
Object Relational Mapping, or ORM, provides a way for your Ruby program/app to manage database data by mapping database tables to classes and instances of classes to rows in those tables. By developing your own ORM you can control how your application interacts with its data AND you can… »