Ruby on Rails
Ruby on rail is our main backend framework at Overloop
The Magic Ingredient
3 words: Conventions over configuration.
Basics
Ruby on Rails (also known as rails) is a web application framework (backend), which presents as a set of ruby gems (aka libraries).
Code Organization
Framework
Rails organization is made around some main components, making what we call the MVC framework:
Model : The representation of the data stored in the database
View : Something that we can display
Controller : The logic for handling a web request
At Prospect, we don't really use the View part of Rails, since we're using Ember for the frontend, and reserve it for a very little subset of elements (mails, PDFs, ...). That's the API configuration of Rails.
Apart from that, Rails also includes a set of other components:
ActiveJob : A system for background action processing
ActiveMailer : A system to send mails
ActiveRecord: A full featured ORM
ActiveStorage : A system to attach files to models
Components
Rails also come with some components:
Puma: A web server for running rails
Rake : A system for running tasks
The rails console: An interpreter of ruby code, which runs in the context of the current rails app (with all models loaded, ...)
MVC & Service Oriented Architecture
To implement that in Rails, we decided to split our code in two parts:
Business logic:
models
services
Technical elements:
All the technical components of our applications that do not relate to business logic:
controllers
params
serializers
commands
jobs
libraries
Rules
We define strict rules on the roles of each elements:
controllers: handle an HTTP request
params: parse & validate the HTTP parameters
commands: call services and format their results
models: represent database information (and should be as simple as possible)
services: perform business logic (that's were the complex parts go)
jobs: for asynchronous processing
libraries: for non-domain-related utilities (like text processing)
The relation between those elements is unidirectional: technical elements can call business logic, but not the opposite.
As you can see, we use a variety of classes to implement this service oriented architecture.
We will talk about each and every one of them in the subsection of this page. It will allow you to see how we implemented our framework and see a complete flow of execution.
If you discover Rails and our framework for the first time, we highly recommend you to check these out. You can start by learning about controllers, then just continue the flow from there.
References
Documentation
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