Building a Rails App from start to finish: Part 1
I’m going to create a series of posts that will chronicle the building of a simple Rails app from design phase to final implementation. I also want to include the doodling on a napkin parts as I really love design and drawing and is a part of application development I really enjoy.
The app I will be building is already running, but needs a complete overhaul as the business logic has changed and the current app is on an old version of Rails. For this app I will build it on Rails 3.0. I know Rails 3.1 is right around the corner, but since it’s not officially released yet I’m going to stick with 3.0.
App Overview
The need for this app is an order / job tracking system. The business receives orders through a variety of sources and then needs to custom build the order and ensure it gets to the customer. This means there will be a variety of states the order has to go through as it is produced. The people building the order need to know when they have to work on their part of the order and move it through queues. An order can have one or more jobs attached to it, so the app will primarily track the jobs.
Here is a drawing of how the workflow looks which will help define the business rules:
