February 19, 2006
The second day of the Rails Studio covered functional testing and more extensive treatment of Active Record in the morning session, except for the has and belongs to many associations which were put off until the morning of the third day so that we were “fresh” when we were covering them. The afternoon session had a large portion dedicated to coverage of AJAX from within a Rails application, refactoring of common code and markup into components and the factoring out of common markup into partials.
What made the course of particular value wasn’t the mechanical, “this is how you go about creating a partial,” but the discussions that ensued that I found helped to discern when it was appropriate to use a partial — except that it was applied to each of the concepts that were covered and not just partials.
I missed the boat on dinner and ended up ordering a pizza.