Ruby on Rails® Bible

Chapter 12. Advanced Topics

In this final chapter of the Ruby on Rails Bible, you'll learn some additional Rails techniques that haven't been covered yet in previous chapters. While this chapter is named Advanced Topics, you should find the time to master the topics covered here, as many of them are extremely useful for most Rails projects.

Beyond the Basics

If you've been reading this book from the beginning, throughout the course of the book you've learned all of the basic information you need to begin developing real applications with Rails. However, there is still more to say about the power and elegance of Rails. In this chapter you'll explore some additional technologies that you might use in a Rails application, and some that you will most likely want to use in all of your Rails applications.

The topics that you'll learn about in this chapter are the following:

• RESTful Rails

• Web services with Rails

• Working with legacy databases

• ActionMailer

• Deploying with Capistrano

RESTful Rails

One of the things that any good developer strives for in the development of a Web application, or any application for that matter, is a well-organized code base with consistent use of patterns and naming conventions. This contributes a great deal to the overall maintainability of an application. However, maintaining a well-defined organization and consistency in a code base, especially one that is being worked on by multiple developers, is not an easy task. In Web development, there have never been any widely ...