#jumpstart labs

[fnordonrails]

Did the Jumpstart Labs EventManager tutorial. No real issues. It was good to see the actual introduction to ERB (apparently I was supposed to do this before the stuff about Rails? I figured it out anyway). Dir was new, as was the bit about multiline strings, but all that was pretty straightforward (and the syntax goes into Anki).

[fnordonrails]

Finished the third chapter of the Blogger tutorial.

It was a lot of the same stuff from a different perspective: how Views work, and how they pass information to controllers. How forms work. But, like I said, more practice is what I needed.

There was the new thing about the belongs_to/has_many thing. I saw that in the Rails tutorial, too; it still seems like something I just have to treat as a black box.

One thing that confused me. We created the comment_params in the comment controller itself, not in the helper like we did with the article_params. The params functions are also still a little bit black box to me anyway, but it's not clear why did it one way one time and another way the other time. Worse, when I tried to move it to the helper, it stopped working, giving me an undefined local variable or method exception, as if they simple weren't there  (even with include CommentsHelper). I'm puzzled.

I also took a look at some of the autogenerated code in the Rails Tutorial. I recognize some of it from this tutorial, though not as much as I'd like.  

[fnordonrails]

Finished all but the last part (the part on flash) of the 2nd section of the Jumpstart Labs rails tutorial.

I think I'm starting to get at least a rough sense of how the internal architecture of a Rails app works (at least, of the sort we used). It's still something I need to practice more to internalize, and play around with more to really understand, but things basically make sense.

Retrieving or creating the object in the controller, getting data from the user through the template, passing it back through params, and saving (whether with .save or .update) makes sense. I understand what the various fields in the view do, and how I would make more or manipulate data received from them.

It's still a little weird how params carries data from multiple sources. But I liked seeing how you can just look at what params is doing using fail.