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- Herausgeber: Packt Publishing
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
Most users on the Internet have a few favorite Internet web applications that they use often and cannot do without. These popular applications often provide essential services that we need even while we don’t fully understand its features or how they work. Ruby empowers you to develop your own clones of such applications without much ordeal. Learning how these sites work and describing how they can be implemented enables you to move to the next step of customizing them and enabling your own version of these services.This book shows the reader how to clone some of the Internet's most popular applications in Ruby by first identifying their main features, and then showing example Ruby code to replicate this functionality.While we understand that it connects us to our friends and people we want to meet up with, what is the common feature of a social network that makes it a social network? And how do these features work? This book is the answer to all these questions. It will provide a step-by-step explanation on how the application is designed and coded, and then how it is deployed to the Heroku cloud platform. This book’s main purpose is to break up popular Internet services such as TinyURL, Twitter, Flickr, and Facebook to understand what makes it tick. Then using Ruby, the book describes how a minimal set of features for these sites can be modeled, built, and deployed on the Internet.
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Seitenzahl: 375
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010
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Table of Contents
Cloning Internet Applications with Ruby
Cloning Internet Applications with Ruby
Copyright © 2010 Packt Publishing
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.
Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.
Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.
First published: August 2010
Production Reference: 1110810
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
32 Lincoln Road
Olton
Birmingham, B27 6PA, UK.
ISBN 978-1-849511-06-3
www.packtpub.com
Cover Image by Asher Wishkerman (<[email protected]>)
Credits
Author
Chang Sau Sheong
Reviewer
Warren Brian Noronha
Francisco
Acquisition Editor
Douglas Paterson
Development Editor
Chaitanya Apte
Technical Editors
Alfred John
Kartikey Pandey
Indexer
Hemangini Bari
Editorial Team Leader
Aanchal Kumar
Project Team Leader
Lata Basantani
Project Coordinator
Jovita Pinto
Proofreader
Aaron Nash
Graphics
Geetanjali Sawant
Production Coordinator
Arvindkumar Gupta
Cover Work
Arvindkumar Gupta
About the Author
Chang Sau Sheong has more than 15 years experience in software application development and has spent much of his career working on Web and Internet-based applications. He started up elipva, an e-business software company, and was the Vice President of Product Engineering as well as Chief Architect. Subsequently he was Director of Software Development for Welcome Real-time, a bank loyalty software company, Engineering Director for Yahoo! Southeast Asia and Chief Technology Officer for Garena Online, an online game publishing company. He is currently the Director of the Applied Cloud Computing Lab in HP Labs Singapore, the research arm of Hewlett Packard, leading a team of engineers to implement cloud computing solutions.
Sau Sheong frequently writes for technical magazines and journals, including Java Report, Java World, and Dr. Dobb’s Journal. He is a passionate programmer who contributes to open source projects in various technologies including Ruby and Java. He has a wide range of experience in web application development on the Internet and mobile devices. His first book was ‘Ruby on Rails Mashup Projects’ in 2008, also published by Packt Publishing.
Sau Sheong hails from tropical Malaysia but spent most of his adult and working life in sunny Singapore, where he shares his spare time between enthusiastically writing software and equally enthusiastically playing Nintendo Wii with his wife and son. He has a Bachelors degree in Computer Engineering, a Masters degree in Commercial Law, and is a certified international arbitrator.
Acknowledgement
Firstly, many thanks to Douglas Paterson who agreed to this second book project, the book reviewers who have helped me improve my sprawling book and Jovita, the patient project coordinator who would wait patiently and gently prompt me as my chapter deadline approaches. I would also like to thank my Twitter and Hackerspace friends who on many occasions had to endure my relentless requests to test my ‘clones’ and provide feedback on them. A big thank you to Philippe Monnet who helped to review the first few chapters and even offered to re-draw a diagram for me. Final thanks to the love of my life, Wooi Ying, who suffered my erratic ‘nightlife’ in huddling in front of my laptop, creating software and writing yet another book (with her eyes rolling), and then there is Kai Wen who understands Daddy is finally an author.
About the Reviewers
Warren Noronha is an entrepreneur and a geek. Computers have been part of Warren’s life since he was four years old. He began his career as a system administrator, but ended up doing everything from security, design, to product development. He enjoys managing people as much as he does managing code or machines. Having worked with small startups as well as Fortune 500 companies, Warren is also a staunch supporter of free software and free speech. He has been a frequent speaker at various colleges and events, discussing subjects ranging from technology and media to launching a startup.
Warren loves working with new technologies, a trait which lead him to become one of the first users of GNU/Linux, Drupal, and Ruby on Rails, much before they grew exponentially and became mainstream technologies. He spends his time working on databases, distributed computing, and social computing, and enjoys using the Internet and communication technology to bridge the digital divide.
Francisco started out as a software architect and a project manager for various desktop and web applications. Then after falling out of love with outdated technologies and processes switched over to system admin and server infrastructure expert. Ruby was the catalyst to bring him back to the software development with agile processes. Currently a Mac lover and Ruby all in one backend expert. His experience in the server provisioning world and background as software developer resulted in quick rollout of fast, secure, and reliable backend Ruby on Rails applications for the enterprise.
Preface
We stand on the shoulders of giants. This has been true since the time of Newton (and even before) and it is certainly true now. Much of what we know and learn of programming, we learnt from the pioneering programmers before us and what we leave behind to future generations of programmers is our hard-earned experience and precious knowledge. This book is all about being the scaffolding upon which the next generation of programmers stands when they build the next Sistine Chapel of software.
There are many ways that we can build this scaffolding but one of the best ways is simply to copy from what works. Many programming books attempt to teach with code samples that the readers can reproduce and try it out themselves. This book goes beyond code samples. The reader doesn’t only copy snippets of code or build simple applications but have a chance to take a peek at how a few of the most popular Internet applications today can possibly be built. We explore how these applications are coded and also the rationale behind the way they are designed. The aim is to guide the programmer through the steps of building clones of the various popular Internet applications.
What this book covers
Chapter 1, Cloning Internet Applications gives a brief description of the purpose of the book, the target readers of the book, and a list of the four popular Internet applications we will be cloning in the subsequent chapters. The bulk of this chapter gives a brief run-down on the various technologies we will be using to build those clones.
Chapter 2, URL Shorteners – Cloning TinyURL explains about the first popular Internet application that we investigate and clone in the book, which is TinyURL. This chapter describes how to create a TinyURL clone, its basic principles, and algorithms used.
Chapter 3, Microblogs – Cloning Twitter. The clone in this chapter emulates one of the hottest and most popular Internet web applications now—Twitter. It describes the basic principles of a microblogging application and explains how to recreate a feature-complete Twitter clone.
Chapter 4, Photo -sharing – Cloning Flickr. Flickr is one of the most popular and enduring photo-sharing applications on the Internet. This chapter describes how the reader can re-create a feature complete photo-sharing application the simplest way possible, following the interface and style in Flickr.
Chapter 5, Social Networking Services – Cloning Facebook 1. The final two chapters describe the various aspects of Internet social networking services, focusing on one of the most popular out there now—Facebook. These two chapters also describe the minimal features of a social networking service and show the reader how to implement these features in a complete step-by-step guide. The first part is described in this chapter, which sets the groundwork for the clone and proceeds to describe the data model used in the clone.
Chapter 6, Social Networking Services – Cloning Facebook 2. The final chapter is part two in describing how to create a Facebook clone. This chapter follows on the previous chapter and describes the application flow of the Facebook clone we started earlier.
What you need for this book
Basic Ruby programming skills and basic level operational knowledge of Sinatra, DataMapper, Haml, Blueprint CSS, and MySQL.
Who this book is for
This book is written for web application programmers with an intermediate knowledge of Ruby. The reader should also know how web applications work and have used at least some of the cloned Internet services before.
A typical reader would be a programmer looking to write their own customized TinyURL, Twitter, Flickr, or Facebook. Programmers who want to include features of these Internet services into their own web applications will also find this book interesting.
Reader feedback
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If there is a topic that you have expertise in and you are interested in either writing or contributing to a book on, see our author guide on www.packtpub.com/authors.
Customer support
Now that you are the proud owner of a Packt book, we have a number of things to help you to get the most from your purchase.
Tip
Downloading the example code for this book
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Errata
Although we have taken every care to ensure the accuracy of our content, mistakes do happen. If you find a mistake in one of our books—maybe a mistake in the text or the code—we would be grateful if you would report this to us. By doing so, you can save other readers from frustration and help us improve subsequent versions of this book. If you find any errata, please report them by visiting http://www.packtpub.com/support, selecting your book, clicking on the errata submission form link, and entering the details of your errata. Once your errata are verified, your submission will be accepted and the errata will be uploaded on our website, or added to any list of existing errata, under the Errata section of that title. Any existing errata can be viewed by selecting your title from http://www.packtpub.com/support.
Piracy
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We appreciate your help in protecting our authors, and our ability to bring you valuable content.
Questions
You can contact us at <[email protected]> if you are having a problem with any aspect of the book, and we will do our best to address it.
Chapter 1. Cloning Internet Applications
This book is about copying. Copying has an unpleasant reputation in these copyright and intellectual property sensitive times, but it's probably unknown to many, that it has an illustrious past. When we were babies, the main way we learnt was through copying what our parents did. If you have young children you soon learn to your regret the first time you utter any insalubrious words and how quickly your child copies your exclamation and mannerisms. Our number system was copied from the Arabs (that's why they are called Arabic numerals) but it was first used by the Indians from the Indian subcontinent, and subsequently copied by the Arabs in the Middle-East. The English language regularly copies words from other languages. In fact the word 'copy' comes from the Old French word copie which comes from the Medieval Latin word copia.
That is not to say infringing copyright is the right thing to do when someone else has spent tremendous effort in coming up with the original. However, it should be recognized that not all things are copyrightable, patentable, or can be trademarked, and that is for a good reason. Ideas for example are generally not considered as intellectual property. Copyright is the protection of expressions of ideas, not the protection of the ideas themselves. Patent law is used for the protection of inventions for a limited time in return for the disclosure of the invention. Again it is not a protection of ideas; the concept of patent law is to promote the liberation of the idea in exchange for limited monopoly. Google is well known to have dominance in the search engine market but it doesn't mean it has monopoly on search engines. Anyone else is free to write his/her own search engine (though taking part of Google's search engine code to write your own search engine is copyright infringement).
This idea of copying is the basis of the book you are holding. In short, the premise of this book is to learn how each of the popular Internet applications we clone work through copying the ideas behind them.
In this chapter we will cover:
Who would find this book useful
The primary audience for this book are Ruby programmers with an intermediate level of experience in Ruby as well as web application programming. This sounds quite limiting but in reality if you have any intermediate level of programming in any object-oriented language you should be able to follow the implementations with relative ease. Of course, if you know something about the Ruby programming language it helps a lot too.
The technology stack that we will be using for these clones is slightly off the usual track for the Ruby on Rails crowd. The main reason is because it's a simpler stack to use. Ruby on Rails, while extremely easy to use and very powerful, has a lot of added frills to the framework, which adds on unnecessary complexity for a book that focuses on clones and features of the clones only. The chosen stack however does not different too greatly for programmers who are familiar with Rails. In this chapter we will go through all that is needed to follow the rest of the chapters in this book.
So why are we interested in cloning these applications at all, since we can't possibly build a clone that is better than the original? There are plenty of reasons for doing so but let me just give four common ones:
If you find yourself having any of the above needs then this book is for you.
Popular Internet applications
Why did we choose the Internet applications in this book and not others? Firstly and most obviously, the applications must be popular and have a large number of users. Secondly the application should be a mainstream one for consumers and not for businesses. We want applications that have a more direct interface to the final consumers of the application. Thirdly, we don't want to deal with payment related issues in this book so any e-commerce applications are left alone. The reason is simple—e-commerce is no longer rocket science but implementing payment well is still not a trivial undertaking, and we did not want to mislead users into believing it is easy to clone payment features. Finally (and most importantly for me) the applications we chose to clone must also be easy to implement and would fit in nicely into a single chapter.
With these criteria, we have picked the following small number of applications to cover in this book:
It's interesting that none of the crop of popular Internet applications we are cloning in this book is the true original implementation of the main idea in that application. There have been URL shorteners before TinyURL, there were micro-blogging sites before Twitter, photo-sharing before Flickr, and definitely social networking services before Facebook. However, each of these is, as of writing, the most popular service of its kind.
