About This Book

This book is not a tutorial or basic introduction to Ruby or Rails. It is meant as a day-to-day reference for the full-time Rails developer. At times we delve deep into the Rails codebase to illustrate why Rails behaves the way that it does, and present snippets of actual Rails code. The more confident reader might be able to get started in Rails using just this book, extensive online resources, and his wits, but there are other publications that are more introductory in nature and might be a wee bit more appropriate for beginners.

I am a fulltime Rails application developer and so is every contributor to this book. We do not spend our days writing books or training other people, although that is certainly something that we enjoy doing on the side.

I started writing this book mostly for myself, because I hate having to use online documentation, especially API docs, which need to be consulted over and over again. Since the API documentation is liberally licensed (just like the rest of Rails), there are a few sections of the book that reproduce parts of the API documentation. In practically all cases, the API documentation has been expanded and/or corrected, supplemented with additional examples and commentary drawn from practical experience.

Foreword

Rails is more than programming framework for creating web applications. It’s also a framework for thinking about web applications. It ships not as a blank slate equally tolerant of every kind of expression. On the contrary, it trades that flexibility for the convenience of “what most people need most of the time to do most things.” It’s a designer straightjacket that sets you free from focusing on the things that just don't matter and focuses your attention on the stuff that does.

To be able to accept that trade, you need to understand not just how to do something in Rails, but also why it’s done like that. Only by understanding the why will you be able to consistently work with the framework instead of against it. It doesn’t mean that you’ll always have to agree with a certain choice, but you will need to agree to the overachieving principle of conventions. You have to learn to relax and let go of your attachment to personal idiosyncrasies when the productivity rewards are right.

This book can help you do just that. Not only does it serve as a guide in your exploration of the features in Rails, it also gives you a window into the mind and soul of Rails. Why we’ve chosen to do things the way we do them, why we frown on certain widespread approaches. It even goes so far as to include the discussions and stories of how we got there—straight from the community participants that helped shape them.

Learning how to do Hello World in Rails has always been easy to do on your own, but getting to know and appreciate the gestalt of Rails, less so. I applaud Obie for trying to help you on this journey. Enjoy it.

Preface

A former colleague of mine used to say that thick books about design patterns were evidence of an inadequate programming language. What he meant was that, because design patterns are the common idioms of code, a good programming language should make them very easy to implement. An ideal language would so thoroughly integrate the patterns that they would almost disappear from sight.

To take an extreme example, in the late 1980s I worked on a project that produced object-oriented code in C. Yes, C, not C++. We pulled off this feat by having ach “object” (actually a C structure) point to a table of function pointers. We operated on our “objects” by chasing the pointer to the table and calling functions out of the table, thereby simulating a method call on an object. It was awkward and messy, but it worked. Had we thought of it, we might have called this technique the “object-oriented” pattern. Of course, with the advent of C++ and then Java, our object-oriented pattern disappeared, absorbed so thoroughly into the language that it vanished from sight. Today, we don’t usually think of object orientation as a pattern— it is too easy.

But many things are still not easy enough. The justly famous Gang of Four book (Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software by amma, Helm, Johnson, and Vlissides) is required reading for every software engineer today. But actually implementing many of the patterns described in Design Patterns with the languages in widespread use today (Java and C++ and perhaps C#) looks and feels a lot like my 1980s-vintage handcrafted object system. Too painful. Too verbose. Too prone to bugs.

As business becomes more and more global, software developers increasingly need to make applications multi-lingual and culturally aware. The .NET Framework may well have the most comprehensive support for internationalization and globalization of any development platform to date, and .NET Internationalization teaches developers how to unlock and utilize that support.

Experienced international application developer Guy Smith-Ferrier covers the internationalization of both Windows Forms and ASP.NET applications, using both Versions 1.1 and 2.0 of the .NET Framework. Smith-Ferrier not only teaches you the best ways to take advantage of the globalization and internationalization features built in to the .NET Framework and Visual Studio, he also provides original code to take globalized applications to the next level of international utility and maintainability.

Key topics include

• An introduction to the internationalization process and how localization and globalization are supported in Windows and the .NET Framework
• The use of resource managers, cultures, resource DLLs, and localized strings, images, and files—including strongly typed resources
• Detailed coverage of form localization in Windows Forms and Web Forms
• Dealing with regional cultures and their casing, collation, and calendars
• Managing right-to-left Middle-Eastern text and pictographic East Asian languages
• How to use the book’s original resource administration utilities
• How to translate resources with machine translation
• How to create custom cultures and integrate them with the .NET Framework 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005
• How resource managers work and how to write custom resource managers, including a resource manager that uses a database
• How to test your internationalization with FxCop using new and existing globalization rules
• How to effectively include the translator in the internationalization process

Whether you are a developer, architect, or manager, if you are involved in international applications with the .NET Framework, this is the one book you need to read and understand before you start development.

Guy Smith-Ferrier is an author, developer, trainer, and speaker with more than 20 years of software engineering experience. He has internationalized applications in four development platforms, including the .NET Framework. A frequent conference speaker, Guy is the author of C# and .NET courseware and has written numerous articles.

You can read his blog at www.guysmithferrier.com