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

On global and current states

Global state is evil – this is a typical phrase with regard to any usage of global variables or shared mutable state in software programs. It’s hard to argue against this statement. Here are the most notable drawbacks of using globals:

  • Global state introduces hidden dependencies between application components (and abstraction layers).
  • Mutable global state makes code execution unpredictable, since it can be changed outside the current context. In multithreaded environments, that can lead to bugs due to race conditions.
  • Understanding and testing code relying on globals is more complicated.

Doesn’t this mean we should avoid global state as much as possible? The answer depends on what your goal is – building software products or creating ideal code (whatever that means for you). Ruby on Rails is a framework to build web products; thus, it can afford to use unpopular patterns to improve developers’ productivity...