Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

In this chapter, we will integrate RailsCoders with some other web applications, creating what has become known as a mashup, which is simply using parts of existing web applications to build something new.

In Chapter 6, we added blogs to RailsCoders that allows users of the site to create their own blogs. Currently, all blogs on RailsCoders look similar to other pages on the site; there is no way for a user to personalize the look of a blog. This would be a desirable feature, because most bloggers wish to personalize their blogs, either by using or adapting an existing template or creating their own design from scratch.

We now have a fully functioning social networking community site. But currently it is only available to users while they are sitting at their desktop or laptop computers. And, in many countries in the world, more people access the Web from a mobile phone than from PCs. In this chapter, we will develop an alternate interface to our application, allowing the site to be used on mobile phones or other small-screen devices, such as PDAs or smartphones. This will allow our users to keep in touch with their contacts on the site at any time, even when they are away from their computers.

In this chapter, we will look at how you can take your application live by deploying it on a production server and how you can monitor, optimize, and scale your application as it starts to grow. As you might expect, there are a number of tools available for Rails that help automate the deployment procedure. The most important tool that we will be using for deployment tasks is Capistrano.