Layered Design for Ruby on Rails Applications: Discover practical design patterns for maintainable web applications

Transition from the traditional Rails model-view-controller trio to an abstraction model and let your application codebase evolve with synchronized components, boosting flexibility and maintainability

Key Features

• Understand Rails’ architectural patterns along with its advantages and disadvantages
• Organize business logic in Rails apps when the default approach is insufficient
• Introduce new abstractions to address design problems

Book Description

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.

What you will learn

• Discover Rails’ core components and its request/response cycle
• Understand Rails’ convention-over-configuration principle and its impact on development
• Explore patterns for flexibility, extensibility, and testability in Rails
• Identify and address Rails’ anti-patterns for cleaner code
• Implement design patterns for handling bloated models and messy views
• Expand from mailers to multi-channel notification deliveries
• Explore different authorization models and layers
• Use a class-based approach to configuration in Rails

Who this book is for

This book is for Rails application developers facing challenges in managing the growing complexity of their projects. It offers practical strategies for maintaining code readability and manageability, providing valuable guidance for developers at all levels. Whether you’ve recently launched your first Rails minimum viable product or are struggling to progress with a sizable monolithic application, this book is here to help. A deep understanding of core Rails principles is a must. Some experience in building web applications using the Rails framework will enhance your comprehension and application of the concepts presented in the book.