Chapter 2. Rails on the Web

Now that you have Rails installed, it’s time to make Rails do something—not necessarily very much yet, but enough to show you what happens when you make a call to a Rails application, and enough to let you do something to respond when those calls come in. There’s a long tradition in computer books of starting out with a program that says “hello” to the programmer. We’ll follow that tradition and pursue it a bit further to make clear how Rails can work with HTML. You’re welcome, of course, to make Rails say whatever you’d like.

Note:

The work in this chapter depends on the hello application created in Chapter 1. If you didn’t create one, go back and explore the directions given there. You can also find the files for the first demonstration in ch02/hello001 of the downloadable code.