Cloning Internet Applications with Ruby

Make clones of some of the best applications on the Web using the dynamic and object-oriented features of Ruby

Key Features

Build your own custom social networking, URL shortening, and photo sharing websites using Ruby
Deploy and launch your custom high-end web applications
Learn what makes popular social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook tick
Understand features of some of the most famous photo sharing and social networking websites
A fast-paced tutorial to get you up and running with cloning some of the most impressive applications available on the Web.

Book DescriptionMost users on the Internet have a few favorite Internet web applications that they use often and cannot do without. These popular applications often provide essential services that we need even while we don't fully understand its features or how they work. Ruby empowers you to develop your own clones of such applications without much ordeal. Learning how these sites work and describing how they can be implemented enables you to move to the next step of customizing them and enabling your own version of these services.This book shows the reader how to clone some of the Internet's most popular applications in Ruby by first identifying their main features, and then showing example Ruby code to replicate this functionality.While we understand that it connects us to our friends and people we want to meet up with, what is the common feature of a social network that makes it a social network? And how do these features work? This book is the answer to all these questions. It will provide a step-by-step explanation on how the application is designed and coded, and then how it is deployed to the Heroku cloud platform. This book's main purpose is to break up popular Internet services such as TinyURL, Twitter, Flickr, and Facebook to understand what makes it tick. Then using Ruby, the book describes how a minimal set of features for these sites can be modeled, built, and deployed on the Internet.What you will learn

Discover in depth the major features of TinyURL, Twitter, Flickr, and Facebook and what makes them work
Discover how each of these popular Internet services can be modeled with DataMapper
Create clones of these Internet services using Rack and Sinatra
Use third-party authentication providers with OpenID
Deploy the cloned Internet services to the cloud using Heroku
Use Amazon S3 to store data for your clones

Who this book is forThis book is written for web application programmers with an intermediate knowledge of Ruby. You should also know how web applications work and you have used at least some of the cloned Internet services before. If you are a trying to find out exactly how can you make your very own customized applications such as TinyURL, Twitter, Flickr, or Facebook, this book is for you. Programmers who want to include features of these Internet services into their own web applications will also find this book interesting.