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

Thinking in components

The problem we’re trying to solve here—increasing the maintainability of the view layer—is not new. In the last decade, one design paradigm became prevalent: breaking down views into isolated, self-contained components. Every logical piece of UI must be backed by a component in your code base. Think in components, not templates.

This approach proved to be efficient in the world of frontend development. Modern libraries such as React, Vue, and Svelte all drive the component-based architecture.

How can we use this idea in Rails? Let’s try to build some view components!

Turning partials and helpers into components

Let’s consider what we need to turn partials and helpers into components. Components are isolated and self-contained. Thus, we need to keep all the logic related to a UI element in a single place. Isolation also means that we shouldn’t have access to a global state (for example, a controller’...