Accelerated Application Development with AppTrain
on Ruby on Rails

• Designing the Petstore App
• Creating an AppTrain App
• Creating Forms
• Adding a Relationship
• Adding Data
• Additional Datatypes
• Agile Development
• Learn Rails

This article contains your personalized fortune. I'm getting a reading on your future right now...
get ready for your life to change ... You are going to love AppTrain. After spending 20 minutes and creating
a few simple web pages that store their information in a database, you'll be amazed and want to know more.

Eventually you'll realize that AppTrain is just a simple Web front end for creating applications that run on
the Rails framework. You'll then seek a relationship on a deeper level. Then , you're going to love Rails. Rails is a
brilliant framework that will give you the opportunity to develop well structured web applications in the coolest
and the hottest language around. Ruby. And of course, you'll love Ruby.

Step 1: Designing the Petstore App

Let's start with some concepts that represent items for sale in a petstore. The diagram below shows three
distinct concepts in the petstore; category, product, and item.

This diagram captures what data we need to collect for our petstore app. In software design, we call
concepts that will be represented by software classes. So this diagram is a class diagram. Each box in the diagram
represents a separate class. The top portion of the box is the class name. The bottom portion contains attributes that
each item in that class will contain.

Petstore Class Diagram

If you've worked with databases before, You'll be happy to know that Rails maps each class to a table,
and each attribute in that class is a column in that table.

Just to keep your head in the game, AppTrain maps classes to Forms, and attributes to fields in that form.

Also notice the arrows between classes . These signify relationships between the classes. So from the diagram,
we know that a Category has many Products, and a Product belongs to a category.

Step 2: Creating an A-Train App

All right, it's 2006 already. No need for any software installation, ¹ The network
is the computer right?

Take a trip in you browser to http://www.apptrain.com/app

Enter a name for you new App in the lonely text area. Your own name is fine. For this tutorial
I'm using 'petstore' . Then click 'New App'

Nice work! You've created a space for your App. Now it's time to create a few Forms.

Step 3: Creating Forms

a) In the Text Field labeled 'name' type category.

b) Now go down to the data fields section, and type name in the 'name' field.

c) Then click 'Create'.

Awesome, Now click 'New Form' and name this form product.

In addition to the name field that we added to category, product also contains a description field.
So click the '+' button, and type description in the new 'name' field that appears. Then click the 'Type'
combo box next to description that says 'text'. Change it to say 'multi-lined text box'.

Now hold on a sec ... don't hit 'Create' just yet!

Step 3a: Adding a Relationship.

Hit the plus sign once more. Then click the Type combo box again. Notice that it has 'Category'
as an option. Select that. This new form will now reference 'Category'.

Now you're ready, and your screen should look like the one above. Hit 'Create'.

.

Step 4: Adding Data

a) Click on the word 'category'

The white screen means that you've left AppTrain, and are now viewing your new Form.

b) Click 'New Category'.

c) In the name field enter something like 'Dogs', and hit 'create'

Click 'New Category' again and add something like 'Fish'

d) Now hit the back button a few times, until you're back on the blue “Editing petstore app”
screen, and click 'product', then new product.

Notice the combo-box at the botom of the screen. It is automatically populated with data
we entered in the category form.

e) Enter a product like, 'Dog food', or 'Ceramic Castle' and assign it to a Category.

Step 5: Additional Datatypes

Notice how selecting different datatypes on the 'new form' screen changes the way data is entered on the form?

Lets look at the Item class:

Click the back button a few times (sorry about all that but this is only an Alpha release!) and
get back to the pale blue AppTrain screen. It should say “Editing petstore app” at the top.

a) Click 'New Form' and enter Item as the name.

b) Add datafields and make sure their 'type' corresponds to the types on the class above.

c) When your screen looks something like the one on the next page, hit 'Create'

The resulting Form should look something like this:

Step 6: Agile Development

In almost no time and with absolutely no code, you've created an administrative application for
your online petstore.

Welcome to the world of Agile development: http://agilemanifesto.org.

You'll find that Accelerated development with tools like Rails and AppTrain. leads to much
greater collaboration with customers, which results in better software.

Step 7: Learn Rails

AppTrain only scratches the surface of The Rails Framework. I highly recommend a copy of
“Agile Web Development with Rails” to get rolling.

http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/titles/rails/index.html

And to get a handle on the Ruby language, there's the PickAxe, aka. “Programming Ruby”;

http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/titles/ruby/index.html

I know that these are both from the same publisher, but The Pragmatic Programmers have been
instrumental in making programming fun again for lots of folks, including myself.

Well, if you made it this far, back to your fortune.. The future looks bright! Welcome aboard
AppTrain.