The challenge
A few months ago, I took a Rails design challenge from Robby Russell and Gary Blessington at Planet Argon to create a simple Ruby on Rails app that meets the following criteria:
- A user should be able to upload a file intended for a recipient.
- The recipient should receive an email message with a hyperlink to the file’s launch page via query string. In the page, the recipient will see more information about the file in question and then be able to download it.
- After 72 hours, an automated Rake process will go through and delete the record. No need to have clutter, right?
The result
The finished product is here and if you’re into that sort of thing, you can check out my code at GitHub. It’s ugly, since I didn’t even bother with formatting, but it’s functional. It was good practice for Rake processes and file handling. These files get saved out to Amazon Web Services and I have additional functionality up there which deletes files older than 4 days. If you’re a Rails novice like me and you feel there’s code of some value for you, go ahead and use it.
Observations
This is one of those “oh duh, I did do that, didn’t I?” things. Here I am writing about graphic design and web development and I haven’t blogged about what I’ve put online! I have to say, it’s much easier to design Rails apps when you’re building for a specific project. I suspect I’ll be building more web applications as time goes on. I have a simple short story Ruby on Rails app on which I’m about to start development, since I haven’t written either a Rails application or a short story in a while. It’s especially helpful when you have a need in mind before you start development on new things. Just because you’re only learning, doesn’t mean that your Rails applications shouldn’t have some value.