Book Image

Layered Design for Ruby on Rails Applications

By : Vladimir Dementyev
4.7 (3)
Book Image

Layered Design for Ruby on Rails Applications

4.7 (3)
By: Vladimir Dementyev

Overview of this book

Ruby on Rails is an open-source framework for building web applications from scratch while focusing on productivity, leveraging the power of the convention-over-configuration principle, and the well-defined model-view-controller pattern, assisting the developers in building useful features. However, this initial simplicity often leads to uncontrollable complexity turning the well-structured codebase into a hardly maintainable mess. This book aims to help you keep the code maintainable while working on a Rails application. You’ll start by exploring the framework capabilities and principles, allowing you to reap the full potential of Rails. Then, you’ll tackle many common design problems by discovering useful patterns and abstraction layers. By implementing abstraction and dividing the application into manageable modules, you’ll be able to concentrate on specific parts of the app development without getting overwhelmed by the entire codebase. This strategy also encourages code reuse, simplifying the process of adding new features and enhancing the application's capabilities. Additionally, you’ll explore further steps in scaling Rails codebase, such as service extractions. By the end of this book, you’ll be a code design specialist with a deep understanding of the Rails framework principles.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
1
Part 1: Exploring Rails and Its Abstractions
7
Part 2: Extracting Layers from Models
11
Part 3: Essential Layers for Rails Applications
17
Index
18
Gems and Patterns

Authorization, authentication, and friends

The security of a web application is a vast topic. Although (web) frameworks often offer built-in security measures to overcome some common vulnerabilities such as XSS attacks and SQL injections, various other aspects of web application security are the responsibility of engineers building on top of the framework. In this book, we focus on the latter group.

Let’s begin by differentiating between the two most popular and commonly confused concepts: authorization and authentication.

Authentication versus authorization

The meaning of life of every web application is to serve user requests (note that a user is not necessarily a human), and, in most cases, we restrict which requests are available to a particular user and which must be forbidden. The underlying decision-making process could be divided into two phases, which can be represented by the following questions:

  • Who’s there?: Or, on behalf of which domain entity...