Beginning Ruby on Rails E-Commerce. Apress

From Novice to Professional

Christian Hellsten and Jarkko Laine

Learrn how to quickly develop next-generation online shop using Ruby on Rail
THE EXPERT'S VOICE IN OPEN OURCE

Beginning Ruby on Rails E-Commerce

About the Authors
■CHRISTIAN HELLSTEN is the founder of Aktagon Ltd., a provider of
consulting services and custom Internet software development,
and CTO of Sanda Interactive Ltd. He has worked on large-scale
e-business projects as a consultant for PricewaterhouseCoopers
Consulting and IBM Business Consulting Services. Christian’s
background is in J2EE, but he fell in love with Ruby on Rails at first
sight, and has been using it professionally ever since to build web
applications. When he is not changing the diapers of his two young daughters at his home
in Finland, Christian enjoys researching new and better ways of building software.

■JARKKO LAINE is the owner and CEO of O’Design, a Rails-based web
design shop. He has been using Ruby on Rails since its public
launch in 2004. He has contributed patches to the core developer
team, and has also contributed to several Rails plugins. Jarkko has
provided Rails consultancy for a number of organizations, from
nonprofits to Fortune 500 companies. He has also taught Rails at
the university level and delivers lectures about Rails around the
world. Currently, he works on dotherightthing.com, a project that will bring people a
whole new way to rate, follow, and discuss the social responsibility of companies. Jarkko is
a sports junkie, so if he isn’t sitting in front of his computer, he is probably running around
forests or kicking a ball on the nearest field. He lives in Tampere, Finland, with his fiancée
Maria and a growing list of pending household chores.

About the Technical Reviewer
■PETER MARKLUND has extensive experience with and expertise in
object orientation, web development, relational databases, and
testing, and has been doing web development with Java and Tcl
since 2000. He was one of the core developers of the OpenACS
open source web framework. In late 2004, he was introduced to
Ruby on Rails and has since helped develop an online community
and a CRM system with Rails. Peter is currently working as a Ruby
on Rails freelancer and is also helping organize events for the Ruby on Rails developer
community in Stockholm. Peter has a personal blog at http://marklunds.com, where he
shares Rails tips with other developers.


Acknowledgments

First of all, I would like to thank my family for allowing me to take on such a timeconsuming

project as this in my spare time. Secondly, I would like to thank everyone

involved in this project, including Keir Thomas, Jarkko Laine, Peter Marklund, Beth

Christmas, Marilyn Smith, and Kelly Winquist. Last, but not least, I would like to thank my

parents, for buying me a Commodore VIC-20, back in the early 1980s.

Christian Hellsten

I am eternally grateful to the following people: Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto and David

Heinemeier Hansson for bringing passion and joy back to programming; my ex-girlfriend—

now fiancée—Maria, for putting up with the innumerable nights spent married to the computer;

my parents, for telling me to believe in and pursue my dreams, even if it was just

“fooling around with computers”; the whole team at Apress, for towing me back on track in

the moments of despair; and finally, Philip and Alex, for igniting the spark.

Jarkko Laine

Introduction

Beginning Ruby on Rails E-Commerce is for people who want to learn how to build realworld

professional web applications using Rails best practices. We put a specific emphasis

on e-commerce by showing you how to build an online bookstore, including a shopping

cart, catalog, forum, and other functionality. On the front-end, we guide you through

important technologies like Ajax, syndication, tagging, and internationalization. On the

back-end, we show you how to integrate with payment gateways, use ActiveRecord and

the Ferret search engine, and many other techniques.

This book is also targeted at people who already have written an application or two

using Rails, but who want to learn more about how test-driven development (TDD) can

improve the quality of their code, and how to go beyond the standard test features built inside Rails.

We will guide you through all the phases of a professional e-commerce project, from

concept to production deployment and maintenance. In the first chapters, we show you

how to jump-start your project and build a good, solid foundation for it, using agile practices

like TDD. In later chapters, we dig deeper into Ruby on Rails, covering common

requirements, such as translating your application into multiple languages and debugging production problems.

Beginning Ruby on Rails E-Commerce is not intended to be a reference manual for Ruby

on Rails. You can find many online resources and other books that provide a complete reference

to the Ruby on Rails API and features, and these are mentioned throughout this book.

What Is Ruby on Rails?

Ruby on Rails (http://rubyonrails.org) is a web application framework written using the

Ruby programming language. It was originally created by David Heinemeier Hansson, a

Danish hacker, during the development of an online project collaboration tool called Basecamp.

As with most great things, Ruby on Rails started as an itch. Hansson was not happy

with the available web application frameworks at the time, so he decided to write his own.

In the design of Ruby on Rails, David emphasized a couple of things like convention over

configuration, less software, and that programmer happiness ultimately leads to better productivity.

Ruby on Rails was first released to the public in July 2004. Since then, it has seen an

explosive growth in popularity. It is loved because of its simplicity and power, which allow

you to solve problems faster and with less code than, as David said, “most frameworks spend doing XML sit-ups.”

What Is Ruby?

Ruby (http://ruby-lang.org) is a dynamically typed programming language created by a

Japanese Software Engineer called Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto in February 1993. Ruby is

licensed under the GPL-like Ruby license and was released to the public in 1995, which is

about one year later than Java. It is actively maintained by Matz and contributors from all over the world.

Unlike most other programming languages, Matz designed Ruby to increase programmer

happiness, and to let programmers concentrate more on solving the task at hand than

on language syntax. This is arguably the greatest strength of the Ruby programming language,

when compared to other programming languages.

Ruby is a completely object-oriented language, unlike for instance Java, which has

primitives. Everything in Ruby is an object, even nil. Ruby is also highly dynamic, allowing

you to change classes and to introduce new methods at runtime. This allows the

programmer to do things that aren’t possible in languages like Java and C++.

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Product details

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File Size	11,727 KB
Pages	445 p
File Type	PDF format
ISBN-13  ISBN-10	978-1-59059-736-1  1-59059-736-2
Copyright	2006 by Christian Hellsten and Jarkko Laine

Contents at a Glance

About the Authors . . . . .xiii
About the Technical Reviewer . .. . . . xv
Acknowledgments. . . .  .xvii
Introduction  . . . xix

■CHAPTER 1 Project Setup and Proof of Concept . . .  . . . 1

■CHAPTER 2 Author Management . . . .  . . . . . . . . . 29

■CHAPTER 3 Book Inventory Management . . . . . . . . . 59

■CHAPTER 4 Book Catalog Browsing. . .. . . . 113

■CHAPTER 5 Shopping Cart Implementation . . . . . . . . . 141

■CHAPTER 6 Forum Implementation . . . . . . .  . . 169

■CHAPTER 7 Tagging Support . . . . . . . 197

■CHAPTER 8 Security . . . . . . . . . . . .223

■CHAPTER 9 Checkout and Order Processing . . . . . .  251

■CHAPTER 10 Multiple Language Support . . . . . . . . 297

■CHAPTER 11 Acceptance Testing . . . .  . . . . . . . 327

■CHAPTER 12 Application Deployment . . . .  . . . . 351

■CHAPTER 13 Performance Optimization . . .  . . . . . 381

■INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 403

Contents

About the Authors . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . xiii

About the Technical Reviewer. . . . . . .. . . . . . xv

Acknowledgments. . . . . . . . . . .  . . . . . xvii

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . xix

■CHAPTER 1 Project Setup and Proof of Concept

Introducing the Emporium Project . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Installing the Software. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

Installing Ruby . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

Installing RubyGems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Installing Ruby on Rails . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

Installing MySQL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

Installing the MySQL Driver . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

Introducing Scrum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

Creating the Emporium Application . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

Creating the Skeleton Application . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

Creating the Emporium Database . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

Starting Emporium for the First Time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18

How Does Ruby on Rails Work? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20

Implementing the About Emporium User Story . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20

Running the Generate Script . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

Modifying the Generated View . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22

Creating the Layout. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23

Modifying the Generated Controller . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27

Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28

■CHAPTER 2 Author Management

Using Test-Driven Development. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29

Testing in Rails . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30

Unit Testing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30

Functional Testing. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

Integration Testing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

Creating the ActiveRecord Model. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

Using ActiveRecord Migrations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32

Running Unit Tests . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36

Creating the Controller. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37

Implementing the User Stories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39

Adding an Author. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39

Listing Authors. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48

Viewing an Author . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50

Editing an Author. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52

Deleting an Author . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54

Adjusting the Flash Notifications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55

Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57

■CHAPTER 3 Book Inventory Management

Getting the Requirements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59

Using Scaffolding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60

Implementing the Publisher Administration Interface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61

Updating the Schema with the Publishers Table . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61

Generating Publisher Code with the Scaffolding Script . . . . . . . . . . 62

Completing the Add Publisher User Story . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64

Completing the View Publisher User Story . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66

Completing the Edit Publisher User Story . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68

Implementing the Book Administration Interface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69

Updating the Schema with the Books Table. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69

Creating the Book Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73

ActiveRecord Mapping . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73

Modifying the Generated Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77

Cloning the Database . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80

Unit Testing Validations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81

Unit Testing the ActiveRecord Mappings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82

Generating Book Administration Code

with the Scaffolding Script . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88

Integration Testing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90

Completing the Add Book User Story. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91

Completing the Upload Book Cover User Story . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102

Completing the List Books User Story . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104

Completing the View Book User Story . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107

Completing the Edit Book User Story. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110

Testing the Delete Book User Story . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112

Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112

■CHAPTER 4 Book Catalog Browsing

Getting the Book Catalog Requirements. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113

Implementing the Book Catalog Interface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114

Implementing the Browse Books User Story . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116

Implementing the View Book Details User Story . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120

Implementing the Search Books User Story . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125

Implementing the Get Latest Books User Story . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133

Creating an RSS Feed. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136

Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139

■CHAPTER 5 Shopping Cart Implementation

Getting the Shopping Cart Requirements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141

Setting Up the Shopping Cart . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142

Creating the Controller . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142

Adding a Functional Test . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142

Creating the Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143

Modifying the Controller. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145

Creating the Views . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147

Implementing the User Stories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 152

Implementing the Add Items to the Cart User Story . . . . . . . . . . . . 152

Implementing the Remove Items from the Cart User Story . . . . . . 161

Implementing the Clear the Cart User Story . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166

Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168

■CHAPTER 6 Forum Implementation

Getting the Forum Requirements. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169

Using the Threaded Forum Plugin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 170

Setting Up the Forum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171

Updating the Database Schema . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171

Modifying the Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175

Unit Testing the Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 176

Generating the Controller and View . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177

Implementing the User Stories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179

Implementing the Post to Forum User Story. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179

Implementing the View Forum User Story . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185

Implementing the View Post User Story . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 190

Implementing the Reply to Post User Story . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 192

Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195

■CHAPTER 7 Tagging Support

Getting the Tagging Requirements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197

Using the Tagging RubyGem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 198

Setting Up for Tagging . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201

Updating the Database Schema . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201

Preparing the Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203

Unit Testing the Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 204

Using the Console to Test the Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 205

Implementing the User Stories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207

Implementing the Assign Tags User Story . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207

Implementing the Edit Tags User Story . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211

Implementing the List Tags and Show Tag User Stories . . . . . . . . 215

Implementing the Recommend Books User Story . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 218

Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221

■CHAPTER 8 Security

Getting the Authentication Requirements. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223

Using the Authentication Plugin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 224

Implementing the User Stories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227

Implementing the Log In User Story. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227

Implementing the Fail Log In User Story . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233

Implementing the Reset Password User Story . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 238

Protecting Your Application. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 248

Cross-Site Scripting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 248

URL and Form Manipulation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 248

SQL Injection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 249

Cross-Site Request Forgery. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 250

Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 250

■CHAPTER 9 Checkout and Order Processing

Getting the Checkout and Order-Processing Requirements . . . . . . . . . . 252

Implementing the Check Out User Story. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 252

Creating the Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 252

Adding Validations to the Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257

Creating the Controller and Integration Test. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 259

Creating the View . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 262

Saving the Order Information . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 268

Integrating with Payment Gateways . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 271

Installing the Active Merchant Plugin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 271

Integrating with PayPal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 272

Integrating with Authorize.Net . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 280

Using the Payment Gem. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 284

Implementing the Administrator User Stories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 286

Implementing the View Orders User Story . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 286

Implementing the View Order User Story . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 290

Implementing the Close Order User Story. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 292

Calculating Shipping Costs and Taxes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 294

Using the Shipping Gem. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 294

Calculating Taxes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 296

Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 296

■CHAPTER 10 Multiple Language Support

Getting the Localization Requirements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 297

Using the Globalize Plugin. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 298

Localizing with Globalize . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 300

Setting Up Globalize . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 303

Implementing the User Stories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 304

Implementing the Change Locale User Story . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 304

Implementing the Translation User Stories. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 306

Translating the View and the Book Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 313

Translating the View . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 313

Translating the Model. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 317

Localizing Dates, Numbers, and Currency . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 319

Localizing Dates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 319

Localizing Numbers and Currencies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 320

Adding Unicode (UTF-8) Support . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 322

Setting Character Encoding in HTML. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 323

Setting Character Encoding for the HTTP Response . . . . . . . . . . . . 324

Changing the Database to Use UTF-8 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 324

Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 326

■CHAPTER 11 Acceptance Testing

Using Selenium . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 327

Writing Selenium Tests . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 330

Selenium Commands . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 330

Selenium Test Formats . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 334

The First Acceptance Test . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 335

Recording Selenium Tests . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 337

Using the Selenium IDE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 337

Recording the View Forum Acceptance Test . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 340

Recording the Post to Forum Acceptance Test . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 345

Recording the Show Post Acceptance Test . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 347

Recording the Reply to Post Acceptance Test . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 348

Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 350

■CHAPTER 12 Application Deployment

Setting Up the Production Environment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 351

Connecting to the Production Server: SSH . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 352

Installing the Web Server: LightTPD. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 353

Installing the Application Server: Ruby on Rails and FastCGI . . . . 356

Installing the Database Server (MySQL) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 358

Configuring LightTPD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 358

Creating the Production Database . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 365

Deploying the Application Manually . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 366

Copying the Application . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 367

Creating Users and Groups . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 367

Starting LightTPD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 368

Starting FastCGI Processes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 369

Automating Deployment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 371

Installing Capistrano . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 371

Creating the Capistrano Deployment Recipe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 371

Running the Setup Task. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 375

Deploying to Production . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 376

Starting LightTPD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 379

Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 380

■CHAPTER 13 Performance Optimization

Performance and Scaling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 381

Measuring Performance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 382

Checking the Log File . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 382

Using Rails Analyzer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 383

Caching . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 388

Page Caching . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 388

Action Caching. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 390

Fragment Caching. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 390

Fragment Stores . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 392

Caching ActiveRecord Objects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 395

Common Performance Problems in Rails . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 397

Rendering Speed. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 397

Database Access. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 399

Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 401

■INDEX

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