Ajax on Rails

Chapter 12. Review Quiz

Review Quiz is the first of three complete example applications in this book, each designed to demonstrate different techniques for building rich Ajax applications with Rails. The purpose of this application is simply to provide shared quizzes for self-study—like flash cards. The quizzes are self-administered and self-judged, as shown in Figure A-1. Typical use cases:

A quiz is created and used by just one person, such as a college student drilling for an exam

A quiz is created by one person and then shared with a group, such as a high school teacher helping students review course material

A general-interest quiz is created for fun and discovered by other users on the site

Figure 12-1. Review Quiz home

To keep things simple, the application has no user accounts or mechanism for logging on or off. It does, however, have session-based authentication. When a user creates a new quiz, her session ID is stored, and changes can only be made with the same session ID. That means the barrier to entry for new users is extremely low; but it also means that a user can’t reliably return to a quiz to change it after creating it. For most applications, this trade-off wouldn’t be worthwhile, but in this case, an argument can be made that each quiz is sufficiently disposable for this approach. For an example of a user accounts system, see the Intranet Workgroup Collaboration application ...