User Model

Although the ultimate goal of the next three chapters is to make a signup page for our site (mocked up in Figure 6.1), it would do little good now to accept information for new users: We don’t currently have any place to put it. Thus, the first step in signing up users is to make a data structure to capture and store their information.

                In Rails, the default data structure for a data model is called, naturally enough, a model (the M in MVC from Section 1.2.6). The default Rails solution to the problem of persistence is to use a database for long-term data storage, and the default library for interacting with the database is called Active Record. 1 Active Record comes with a host of methods for creating, saving, and finding data objects, all without having to use the structured query language (SQL)2 used by relational databases. Moreover, Rails has a feature called migrations to allow data definitions to be written in pure Ruby, without having to learn an SQL data definition language (DDL). The effect is that Rails

insulates you almost entirely from the details of the data store. In this book, by using SQLite for development and PostgreSQL (via Heroku) for deployment (Section 1.4), we have developed this theme even further, to the point where we barely ever have to think about how Rails stores data, even for production applications.