Ruby on Rails: An Introduction

This on-line class offered by "Coursera" (https://www.coursera.org/learn/ruby-on-rails-intro | February 2016) and explored how to build web applications with the "Ruby on Rails" web application framework, which is geared towards rapid prototyping.
 
It started with the basics of the "Ruby" programming language and continued with more advanced topics, such as attributes, methods, arrays and hashes, exploring also "object oriented" programming in "Ruby", and demonstrating how to perform "unit testing". Core concepts behind "Ruby on Rails", such as "CoC" (Convention Over Configuration) and "MVC" (Model-View-Controller) were introduced, while we learnt about consuming "JSON API" with "HTTParty", a "Ruby" gem, integrating this ability to consume "JSON API" to serve as the data layer for a "Rails" web application that deployed to the "cloud" using "Heroku PaaS" (Platform as a Service). The version control system called "Git" was presented as well that was used to deploy that "Ruby on Rails" application to "Heroku".
 
The course accompanied by hands-on labs and exercises, including the development of the above mentioned "Rails" web application. Below you can find details about the "Recipe Finder" coding assignment.
 



Web application project description
 
The overall goal of this assignment was to implement a "Rails" application using "model", "view", and "controller" classes :
  • the "model" class accesses information.
  • the "view" class displays information and accepts commands from the user.
  • the "controller" class implements actions through internal service logic and the delegation to "model" and "view" classes.

The functional goal was to provide web page access to "recipe" information served by "http://food2fork.com/api" through "JSON" and images.