Process for beginning a Ruby on Rails project
- by Daniel Beardsley
I'm about to begin a Ruby on Rails project and I'd love to hear how others go through the process of starting an application design. I have quite a bit of experience with RoR, but don't have that many starting from scratch with only a vision experiences and would appreciate the wisdom of others who've been there.
I'm looking for an order of events, reasons for the order, and maybe why each part is important. I can think of a few starting points, but I'm not sure where it's best to begin
Model design and relationships (entities, how they relate, and their attributes)
Think of user use-cases (or story-boards) and implement the minimum to get these done
Create Model unit-tests then create the necessary migrations and AR models to get the tests to pass
Hack out the most basic version of the simplest part of your application and go from there
Start with a template for a rails app (like http://github.com/thoughtbot/suspenders)
Do the boring gruntwork first (User auth, session management, ...)
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