Tagged by 'ajax'

January, 2008

This document gives a brief outline of the programming course organised together with the Linux User Group of Villafranca, Verona, Italy. The course introduces programming in JavaScript, Ruby, and fundamentals of Ajax over a ten week period. In twenty intensive hours, students are introduced to the tools and methods used in modern programming practices, and the author's twenty years of experience.

This document is being published on the Internet in parallel with the course. Once the course has finished, it will remain as a tutorial for other fledgling programmers.

LUG Programming Course, 25th February 2008

After our brief, but intense, first look at Ruby, we can start using this excellent scripting language to create our first web application. We previously used the Prototype and script.aculo.us libraries to dynamically modify an XHTML page, now we'll use Ajax via the script.aculo.us Ajax.Autocompleter to 'talk' to a simple Ruby web application.

This lesson will introduce you to WEBrick, the Ruby web server, HTML forms, the ERB templating system, and Ajax.

Despite the amount of code involved, the lesson went quite quickly, and I managed to finish with about twenty minutes to spare. We used that time to go over some of the Ruby code again. Everyone seemed to enjoy the results of running their first web application. One student even started adding his own text files, which I found gratifying, because that was what the application was designed for – any number of plain text files.