Enterprise Rails

Dan Chak has written a really excellent introduction to enterprise web application architecture, and a worthy candidate for your technical bookshelf.Calling it "Enterprise Rails" is a bit misleading, though. Rails only makes fleeting appearances. There's a great introduction to Rails plugin writing, which rightfully urges developers to move any decorator code to plugin modules. He talks a little about segmenting class files along Physical, Logical and Service boundaries, the point of which I have yet to understand completely. And there's a chapter on pushing Rails' application-layer polymorphism down to the data layer, which is good advice, but more on that later.The bulk of Enterprise Rails is devoted to building a solid data layer. Again, good advice. The Rails team decided that referential integrity and validation belongs in the application layer, which Chak contends is dangerous (and I believe him). However, this is where things start to get a little hairy - enforcing referential integrity and validation in the data layer requires an early and continued adherence to SQL, and Chak makes it clear that any old SQL won't do: it's PostgreSQL or nothing.This makes fully half of the book a dissertation on SQL domain description language from the Postgre perspective, domain data, third normal form and other data layer topics. I have greatly enjoyed the introduction to Postgres DDL, but it wasn't exactly what I expected from a Rails book.The last few chapters are mostly about Service Oriented Architecture (which I suspect is why most people buy this book) and caching. Chak shows why he's an expert in enterprise software architecture here. But again, he takes a decidedly anti-Rails approach, emphasizing ActionWebService and XML-RPC. This is not without reason - nearly every language has an XML-RPC library. But ActionWebService, as Chak notes, isn't part of core Rails any longer.REST is quickly reviewed, then mostly dismissed. There's a cursory example of a RESTful service. ActiveResource, Rails' useful core module for REST-oriented SOA, is never mentioned.Pretty much every time Rails comes up in Enterprise Rails (which, as we've seen, isn't often), it's an opportunity for Chak to take it down a peg. Well, Rails deserves it. But I think that slapping the word "Rails" on the book cover is has more to do with marketing than anything else. This is really a tale about data modeling for the enterprise, with an emphasis on Postgre, told by an expert.I'd say that this is required reading for enterprise developers, but don't take the "Rails" part of the title too seriously.

First off let me say that before the publication of this book, the material available for Rails developers has been mediocre at best. Most titles feature either rudimentary examples that bear no relation to real world scenarios or, even worse, a convoluted attempt to show how ruby can be used to construct DSLs. DHH book is by far the best but consistently out-dated to the extent that the tutorial presented in the first part won't work on the latest Rails release.Enter Chak's refreshing take on how Rails is used in the real-world. Instead of rehashing the same tired examples, Chak actually discusses what I would characterise as a "best practice" approach to building enterprise Rails apps. This book does for Rails what Shlossnagle's Scalable Internet Architectures does for enterprise web infrastructures. That is it presents an in-depth analysis of how Rails is implemented in the real world. Just some examples:Chak discusses why postgres is a better open source solution than mysql for heavily trafficed sites.A useful discussion of how to structure your Rails development and production environments and how to correctly implement namespaces and plugins.How to utilize SOA and Restful designs.All in all this is an excellent book. While not for the beginner it is definitely the book to read after you've developed an app or two. It's database centric approach makes it unique among Rails offerings and will bring you up to speed on the CORRECT way to design and implement databases for any development project.This book sorely shows how inadequate the Rails literature has been up to now.

I just finished Enterprise Rails and want to tell you what a capital, outstanding, helpful book it is. I was sad when I finished it!I've been building a startup site of moderate size, not even something you'd call enterprise yet, for the last 3 years. When I started I was just the sort of naive and overconfident Rails guy this book is aimed at. The author has been through all the scaling issues involved with running a popular website and the book is chock full of useful advice and examples. I wish I had read it way back when I started as I have made many of the mistakes he warns about and had to learn the hard way. Dan shows you how to avoid painting yourself in a corner with overly optimistic/naive design choices up front. He shows you how to design things properly from the start, with a special emphasis on using the native features of a relational database instead of doing things at the application level, and how to keep things organized. I love love LOVED this book.

Great book. Puts rails in perspective and provide concrete examples. Not a cheerleading for rails like a lot of other ressources but an actual thoughtful take on how rails can be used to develop enterprise level software.

The author provides an important perspective that can easily be forgotten in the rails community. You may not put into practice everything you find in the book but it is an invaluable, intelligent description of design strategies that need to be re-aquired in the rails community if it wants to survive beyond "this is a really cool language!" ;)

Please, I hope you will publish a new edition for rails 4! This book is great but now outdated.

tutto sommato un buon libro, unico neo: un po' datato.Alcune soluzioni proposte non sono più utilizzabili con le nuove versioni di rails.