WABuR Tutorial

WABuR is a Web Application Builder using Ruby. Releases and additional information can be found at http://www.wab.systems. The WAB approach to building web applications is to follow a Model View Controller (MVC) design pattern that separates each element of the MVC cleanly enough to allow a well-defined API. A well defined API allows flexibility in how each component is implemented.

The goals of the WAB design are modularity and simplicity with the intent of providing an easy-to-use & maintain system that is also high performant. This tutorial walks through building a simple application — a blog, using WABuR and some Javascript. The tutorial is broken into multiple lessons that introduce additional features in each lesson. The primary README.md in each lesson is brief and to the point but each step also refers to more details with a link entitled "tell me more...".

Lesson 1 - Quick Start

The tutorial starts with a simple object design and continues with a description of the WABuR development environment. Once the basics have been covered a blog project is started with a simple implementation.

Lesson 2 - Logging

Logging for tracing the application.

Lesson 3 - HTML Customization

The HTML of individual pages is modified.

Lesson 4 - Controllers

A custom controller is created to add a timestamp to the blog entries.

Lesson 5 - Unit Testing

Create unit tests for the Controller and the Controller as part of a Runner.

Lesson 6 - Advanced Runners

Learn how to use high performance runners.

Lesson 7 - Aggregate Objects

A new object type, a Comment, is added along with updated displays for the inclusion of Comments in a blog Entry.

Lesson 8 - Custom JavaScript

Add new features by adding JavaScript.

Lesson 9 - Writing a Runner and Shell

Describe what is required to write a custom runner and shell.