Shopify Application Development: Build highly effective Shopify apps using the powerful Ruby on Rails framework

Programmers are as passionate about the tools they use to write code as they are about which language the code is written in. There is typically a trade-off between speed and ease of use, in that the tools that are the fastest tend to require memorization of keystrokes and jargon; whereas the ones that are easier to use sacrifice efficiency for a more intuitive user experience.

There are several options available when developing Rails applications. A couple of popular simpler editors are Sublime Text (http://www.sublimetext.com) and TextMate (http://macromates.com). A few popular rich editors are RubyMine (http://www.jetbrains.com/ruby), Aptana (http://www.aptana.com), and Visual Studio with Ruby in Steel (http://sapphiresteel.com).

I've tried them all, and personally tend to oscillate between RubyMine and Sublime Text, depending on the project. If I'll be doing a lot of visual debugging, I'll use RubyMine. But for most projects, I find the speed and intuitive features...

Before we can build our app, we need to set up our local development environment so that we can commit code and deploy to Heroku.

For the purposes of this book, I am going to explicitly specify the version of Rails we want to use rather than just grabbing the latest stable version. I am doing this to ensure that the code examples work correctly several months from now. One catch when using the latest version of Rails is that the gems you want to use might not have been updated yet by their authors. This can lead to bugs being introduced that might not have an easy solution. I tend to lag one version behind (although I do keep an eye out for critical security patches) to ensure that I can build stable apps for my clients. The following command can be used to install Rails 4.0.3:

gem install rails -v 4.0.3 --no-ri --no-rdoc

rails new .

The official website is http://getbootstrap.com and it describes Bootstrap as:

What this means is that we can use Bootstrap to easily allow our web pages to scale based on the device being used. We no longer have to worry about creating separate view files for phones, tablets, and browsers. The scaling is automatically handled using CSS and JavaScript. Bootstrap also includes helpful CSS styles for making buttons stand out, formatting error messages correctly, and a myriad of other common tasks.

Now, it's time to install Bootstrap using some helpful Gems. Add the following lines below the line gem 'sass-rails', '~> 4.0.0' in your Gemfile::

gem "execjs"
gem "twitter-bootstrap-rails"
gem "bootstrap-sass"

At this point, it's a good idea to add our code to a hosted source control. This serves two purposes: the first is that it gives us a record of incremental changes made to each code file, and also acts as an off-site backup in case our development machine gets damaged or has a hard drive failure.

We'll be using Git (http://git-scm.com) as our Source Control Management (SCM) tool. If you don't have Git installed on your system, please follow the relevant installation instructions on the site. Additionally, we're going to use GitHub (http://github.com) as our off-site backup. There are other popular alternatives such as Bitbucket (http://bitbucket.org) or Unfuddle (http://unfuddle.com) that work just as well.

The workflow may vary depending on which service you use, but in general setting up a new repository involves the following steps:

Heroku (http://heroku.com) is a polyglot Platform as a Service (PaaS) that allows scalable hosting of websites written in several popular languages, including Ruby, Python, and Java. Deployment is as simple as installing the Heroku toolbelt and running a few commands. Heroku keeps a copy of our code on its own Git server and deploys the latest version when we do a push.

Sign up for Heroku and then head over to https://toolbelt.heroku.com and follow the installation instructions for your OS.

We need to perform the following steps while using Heroku:

In this chapter, we covered a brief overview of the Ruby on Rails platform, looked at different coding tools, got our development environment set up, and started building our application. We decided to use the Twitter Bootstrap framework to make our views responsive and reduce our frontend coding time. Finally, we checked everything into source control and deployed it to Heroku, which is a scalable cloud service that makes hosting Rails sites a breeze.

We now have a functioning website that we can expand to create our contest application. We'll be developing using an iterative approach, with regular commits to source control and deployments to Heroku to keep our production environment up to date.

In the next chapter, we will start with a high-level overview of the application, build the core business logic, and connect it privately to a Shopify test store.