Is perception reality?
This blog post is about the web dev content in weeks four and five, yet it is being posted at the end of week six. So is the post new or old?
Whether it’s old or new, it exists right now. I guess that is what really matters.
During week four our class perfected our CRUD skills by creating a tumblr-like GIF blog over and over until we memorized the process and the syntax. The CRUD app model is necessary for 99% of all websites as it contains the necessary functions to Create. Read. Update. and Destroy. The CRUD app model is also known as a RESTful resource because it utilizes four of the core methods/requests in HTTP. These four core requests are: [GET, POST, PUT, DELETE]. GET receives data, POST posts data, PUT updates data, and DELETE deletes data. While a CRUD app has the four functions C.R.U.D., there are seven actions behind the scenes that carry out these four functions. Because these actions are so great we call them the “The Golden Seven”. These “Golden Seven” actions are: [New. Create. Show. Index. Update. Edit. Destroy]. Each one of the golden seven actions correspond to a HTTP request: [New => GET, Create => POST, Show => GET, Index => GET, Update => PUT, Edit => GET, Destroy => Delete. I don’t want to scare away non-programmers so I’ll chill out a little bit now… Back to the story:
With our newly equip RoR knowledge in mind, our Web Dev class valiantly fought off hundreds and hundreds of errors messages. We battled swarms of the error messages through the Database(s), Model(s), Route(s), Controller(s), Action(s), View(s) multiple times to weld all the concepts and syntax into our muscle memory. It was one hell of a week. It had to be done. Or so we thought!
We came in the following Monday with stories of success and victory. We focused our attention on the new content, which was a few rails commands like: rails generate controller, rails generate model, rails generate resource, and rails generate scaffold.. As we entered these commands into the terminal and watched rails generate the entire structure of an app, we realized that these commands, these shortcuts, could have build our entire tumblr-like GIF apps in seconds rather than hours…
It was an amazing feeling to utilize these new “rails generate” commands after typing out the RCAV process one step at a time. Discovering the rails generate commands made me feel like I had discovered an epic invention such as the telephone, the bicycle, or penicillin for the first time. Hand programming the CRUD app instilled the Seven Golden methods in our static memory, but it also allowed us to witness the power of Rails when the “generate methods” were introduced. At this point I’m not completely sure if it’s better to use the “rails generate commands” or hand right the seven golden methods… There are advantages and disadvantages to each. It’s a matter of perspective.