Put HTTP in its place with Roda

Every app has boundaries. We encounter them when the app needs to interact with users, the outside word, or systems like databases. Building carefully around our boundaries is important. Do it well and we have an app split into neat layers, an app that is easy to change. Do…

Tim Riley

May 18, 2016

A change-positive Ruby web application architecture

A look into a post-Rails, post-MVC world

A driving theme in our discussions so far has been the importance of assembling your code so that future change becomes easy. We want to enable sustainable development, to…

What you see is what you want

Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Rich Text Editors

We build web sites for our clients and, almost without exception, those sites exist to communicate some content to our clients’ clients. This means…

Tim Riley

May 9, 2016

Better code with an inversion of control container

Last week we walked through the steps required to set up dry-container as an inversion of control container to manage our application’s objects and to make dependency injection easy and practical with dry-auto_inject.

Tim Riley

May 2, 2016

Effective Ruby dependency injection at scale

Last week we found a pattern for functional command objects that uses dependency injection to make it possible to decompose things into small, reusable pieces. Our example was also small: it showed just three objects working together. This has long…

Tim Riley

Apr 25, 2016

Functional command objects in Ruby

In our last visit we discussed the benefits that immutable value objects bring to your Ruby web app. Today, we’ll look at actually making some changes. If our entities are immutable, how do we do this? We use command objects!

Tim Riley

Apr 18, 2016

Inactive records: the value objects your app deserves

Hop into a typical Rails app’s source code or git history and you’ll see that its ActiveRecord::Base subclasses are a real nexus of behaviour and logic. You’ll likely find yourself reaching over to these classes and making changes as you…

My Past and Future Ruby

I want to tell you a story about my life with Ruby.

I’ve been building Ruby on Rails apps since 2005, having dabbled in Ruby for several years prior. For a lot of this time, things were great! Rails really delivered on its productivity promises. As time passed…