The Tutorial: Page Two and It Shows

So, you've got Camping installed and it's running. Keep it running. You can edit files and The Camping Server will reload automatically.

Let's show something. At the bottom of nuts.rb add:

 #!ruby
 module Nuts::Controllers
   class Index < R '/'
     def get
       Time.now.to_s
     end
   end
 end

Save the file and refresh the browser window. Your browser window should show the time, e.g.

 Sun Jul 15 12:56:15 +0200 2007

Enjoying The View

The Camping micro-framework allows us to separate our code using the MVC (Model-view-controller) design pattern. Let's add a view to our Nuts application. Replace the 'module Nuts::Controllers' with

module Nuts::Controllers
  class Index < R '/'
    def get
      @t = Time.now.to_s
      render :sundial
    end
  end
end

module Nuts::Views
  def layout
    html do
      head do
        title { "Nuts And GORP" }
      end
      body { self << yield }
    end
  end

  def sundial
    p "The current time is: #{@t}"
  end
end

Save the file and refresh your browser window and it should show a message like

 The current time is: Sun Jul 15 13:05:41 +0200 2007

and the window title reads "Nuts And GORP".

Here you can see we call render :sundial from our controller. This does exactly what it says, and renders our sundial function. We've also added a special function called layout which Camping will automatically wrap our sundial output in. If you're familiar with HTML, you'll see that our view contains what looks HTML tag names. This is Markaby, which is like writing HTML using Ruby!

Soon enough, you'll find that you can return anything! from the controller, and it will be sent to the browser. But let's keep that for later and start investigating the routes.

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Continue to TheCampingTutorialThree

or

Mosey back to the beginning of TheCampingTutorial.