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

Layered architecture and abstraction layers

So far, we’ve been using the terms abstraction layers and layered architecture interchangeably. Now, it’s time to put everything back into place.

Layered architecture is an established term for the architectural pattern, which implies the separation of application components/functions into horizontal logical layers. The data flows in one direction, from top to bottom; thus, layers do not depend on the layers on top of them.

Let’s look at a layered architecture diagram example:

Figure 5.1 – Layered architecture example

Figure 5.1 – Layered architecture example

The preceding diagram demonstrates a four-layer architecture typical for applications following the domain-driven design (DDD) paradigm. Surprisingly, this architecture fits Ruby on Rails applications, too.

Let’s describe each layer mentioned in the preceding diagram:

  • Presentation layer: Responsible for handling user interactions and presenting...