Workshop 6

This workshop asks us to carry on with the development of the Online Taxi Booking System, and to post what changes and additions have been made to the system. Additionally it asks us to look and consider the aspects of social networking and how it can be applied to the Online Taxi Booking System.

As either a developer or as an IT manager, how can aspects of social networking be applied to the OTBS?

Social networking could be a great tool to market this application to a extremely large consumer base. Very similar to word of mouth, but via a social networking site.

First off a business site could be setup in facebook whereby people could add to their profile and follow. Also addition widgets could be added so to order a taxi via the facebook website through web services. Great place to have customer reviews and feedback on the service, creating like a cult following and really promoting the business to other individuals who might be interested in using the service.

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So now onto the Online Taxi Booking System and the enhancements and changes i have been playing around with...

Basically i've created using the scaffolding approach to create the taxi, and passengers objects. By using the scaffolding approach it has auto generated the model, controller, views (show, edit, new, delete) in a white label format.

The actions have been added to the controllers for show, new, destroy, and edit page redirection.

The addition i have been playing around with has been data validation for the current passenger create page. Ruby on Rails provides a validation library that can be used to validate certain data is contained in the model before it can be saved. Below is the code used and the validation logic added to the model class.
































Unfortunately i tried to play around with AJAX integration into the pages themselves but ran into quite a bit of trouble getting it to work. According to http://www.devarticles.com/c/a/Ruby-on-Rails/Ruby-on-Rails-and-AJAX/2/, it seems as though AJAX integration is already built into the framework and makes it easier for developers to use, however with my limited knowledge of Rails/Ruby i ran into a number of issues that stopped me.

Anyways, I can see why now ruby and rails is very powerful as it gets rid of or reduces quite substantially the mundane tasks as these are automatically created for you via templates so that you can have an application up and running sooner. I wish i had more time to play around with this, as i can see as a developer this framework... gives us more time to be spent on more interesting problems instead of mundane tasks all applications need such as validation, database access etc.