On 28 Dec 2008, at 16:46, Wayne Molina wrote:
>
> Hello and happy holidays, everyone!
>
> I received the book "Enterprise Rails" by Dan Chak as a Christmas gift
> and started reading it; I wanted to gauge the community's thoughts on
> this. Basically, Mr. Chak advocates a totally different approach to
> how every other Rails book/tutorial explains how to develop Rails
> applications.
>
> Firstly, he advocates you organize your application deeper than the
> default Rails skeleton; for example he says to put all of your models
> under a "physical" directory (e.g. app/models/physical) and to
> separate them by module (e.g. Physical::Projects::Project).
>
That seems rather overkill to me.
> He also evangelizes Postgresql instead of MySQL, and suggests not
> using migrations at all but using raw SQL to create the tables,
> because he recommends that you NOT treat the database like a dumb data
> store (something the rest of the Rails community seems to do and be
> okay with) and make good use of check constraints, triggers,
> referential integrity and the like at both the database level AND the
> application level. He is against migrations because of the extremely
> limited subset of SQL they allow for (i.e. no real constraints).
>
It's not an either or situation, since you can very easily do
class FooMigration
def self.up
create_table do
..
end
execute "add a foreign key"
end
end
I do that all the time
> Now, I come from a C# background so this stuff makes sense to me, but
> at the same time I want to follow the best practices from the Rails
> world where I'm looking to redefine myself. I agree with a lot of
> what Mr. Chak says about organization, since the one major fault I
> find with Rails is that it doesn't lend itself to organizing your
> application like other frameworks (e.g. Django); for example if my
> application contains 2 major parts (say a Blog application and a
> Network application), Rails just smushes them both together under the
> app directory, and their models/views/controllers are all kept
> together instead of being separated (e.g. app/models/blog/, app/
> models/
> social). The problem with using the approach from Enterprise Rails is
> that it pretty much means I cannot use the generators, unless I were
> to redefine them to follow the "enterprise" structure. While that's
> not a big deal, I can't help but think that I would be going "against
> the grain" as far as my application is concerned - call me a bandwagon
> jumper, but I always prefer to follow the community when it comes to
> programming, instead of going off on my own.
Rails 3 will have better support for slices of functionality like
that. Personally I'd rather write two separate single-minded
applications than one huge honking one.
>
>
> From reading the book, though, I can't seem to understand why the
> Rails community has never done this from the start. Rails
> applications are meant to be scalable, no? And the big ones have got
> to scale if they get successful, right? The Rails app that Dan Chak
> worked on, according to what he says in the book, ballooned to some
> 188 classes; if other large Rails apps are like that, how do they
> manage?
I think you're mixing different concepts there - Scaling to handle
large volumes seems unrelated to how many models you have (The biggest
app I work on has way more that 188 classes and I can't say I feel the
need for namespaceing them).
Fred
>
>
> Basically - I'm wondering if I should be following the advice in the
> book from the get-go when I design my application, or if I should
> follow the best practices of the Rails community and not worry about
> the "enterprise" stuff until I need to (at which point it may or may
> not be too late). Also remember that I am fairly new to Rails but I
> still want to do things the "right" way.
>
> Any insight from experienced Rails developers would be appreciated -
> when I started reading the book I couldn't believe that these things
> are NOT done in the Rails world, because they seem like common sense
> to me that any professional developer would do, and yet almost all of
> the Rails people I've read about and talked to consider them to be
> inconsequential. Maybe my vision is just skewed, coming from the
> Microsoft world.
>
> >
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