I’d like to find some information on the high-level control
flow of Rails. Currently, my understanding is that
The request comes into the server.
It gets routed to a controller.
The appropriate view gets processed, using the appropriate
templates, etc.
This is a bit vague and mystical for my taste. Has someone
written up a description of the principal methods that make
all of this work? If so, I’d love to see it!
-r
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Look up Model-View-Controller in Wikipedia 
I can’t think of anything offhand - most of the information available is
of a how-to nature rather than theoretical. Have you looked at the
Rolling with Ruby on Rails articles on the O’Reilly website? It may be
worth your while getting a copy of the Agile Web D. with Rails
book and working through the tutorials. I think this will give you a
much better idea of how Rails works than any high-level overview. It
shouldn’t take more than a day. Alternatively, you could re-post in the
Rails core forum - you may get a more sensible answer there.
I put an overview on:
http://rtfm.calicowebdev.com/articles
I hope it’s useful.
Steve
Rich M. wrote:
templates, etc.
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At 6:47 AM +0100 1/28/07, Mick S. wrote:
Look up Model-View-Controller in Wikipedia 
-1
I’m quite familiar with the overall principles of MVC.
What I’m looking for is a high-level description of the
way that Rails implements its version of MVC.
-r
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At 7:27 AM +0100 1/28/07, Mick S. wrote:
I can’t think of anything offhand - most of the information
available is of a how-to nature rather than theoretical.
That is my impression, as well.
Have you looked at the Rolling with Ruby on Rails articles
on the O’Reilly website?
Yes
It may be worth your while getting a copy of the Agile Web
Development with Rails book and working through the tutorials.
I went through the tutorials in the first edition, a few months
ago. I’m now most of the way through the tutorials in the second
edition (which is greatly improved, IMHO).
I think this will give you a much better idea of how Rails works
than any high-level overview.
Actually AWDwR provides very little information on the internal
workings of Rails. It’s mostly “put this here, put that there,
and voila, it all works”. This isn’t bad, but it doesn’t serve
my need for information on HOW it all works.
Alternatively, you could re-post in the Rails core forum - you
may get a more sensible answer there.
I’ll consider that; thanks.
-r
http://www.cfcl.com/rdm Rich M.
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These aren’t high-level questions at all. What routines invoke
controllers? I
don’t think you’ll ever need this, but you can trace the codepath quite
easily in the Rails source to see that Dispatcher::dispatch determines
the
actual controller by running the request through the routing logic.
ActionController::process is the base class method that gets that name
of
the action (as it says in the comments) from the request parameters and
then
runs the corresponding action.
Rich M. wrote:
friendly" version. However, there’s still a lot of
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It looks like public/dispatch.{cgi,fcgi,rb} are the first
bits of Ruby code that get executed in Rails, depending on
the execution environment. Is this the case?
If so, why might
system(‘/usr/bin/touch /tmp/t1’)
in them be failing to act?
Details:
This is in a Locomotive environment on Mac OS X.
% which touch
/usr/bin/touch
-r
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At 10:47 PM -0800 1/27/07, s.ross wrote:
I put an overview on:
http://rtfm.calicowebdev.com/articles
I hope it’s useful.
Yes, it is, although I wish you would put up a “print-
friendly” version. However, there’s still a lot of
“passive voice” being used, as:
“Controller Code Invoked”
“View Rendered”
What routines do the invocation and rendering? Who is
responsible for bringing in layouts, etc? Like that…
-r
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The first thing that comes to mind is permissions.
Have you looked at your return code and system error logs?
Try touching something you know you have permissions to access for
write.
Also:
ls -l / | grep tmp
and see who the owner is.
Rich M. wrote:
in them be failing to act?
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At 1:12 PM -0800 1/28/07, s.ross wrote:
The first thing that comes to mind is permissions.
/tmp (really, /private/tmp on Mac OS X) is mode rwxrwxrwxt
(writable by anyone, but sticky). I’m trying to write into
a file in it, as a way to check that some code is getting
run. Perhaps I should use other tracing options, but this
seemed the simplest (and least dependent on Rails, etc.)
-r
http://www.cfcl.com/rdm Rich M.
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I think what you need is chapter 2 of the “Ruby for Rails” book by
David A. Black. I’ve been working on Rails for a while now however I
just bought the book yesterday. I’ve been through the first chapter
only and what a mistake I made by not reading this book before
starting working with Rails. I think this should be the starting point
for anyone starting Rails development.
Hope this helps.