Most 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.

Break up and rewrite popular social networking and other Internet applications using Ruby

What you will learn from this book

• 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

Approach

This is a hands-on book with plenty of well - explained code. Each chapter has a standalone project in which a complete web application with specific features of a social networking site is emphasized. The final chapter of the book is a project that has a complete and fully developed social networking site. Each chapter begins with a brief description of the features of the Internet service and the market it is within. After extracting the main features of the service, the chapter goes into explaining how a clone of the service can be designed, followed by a short description of the technologies and platforms being used. The bulk of the chapter goes into describing how the clone is built, with step-by-step explanations and code examples. Finally, the chapter shows how the finished clone can be deployed on the Internet.

Who this book is written for

This 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.