Enterprise Rails

by Dan Chak

What does it take to develop an enterprise application with Rails? Enterprise Rails introduces several time-tested software engineering principles to prepare you for the challenge of building a high-performance, scalable website with global reach. You'll learn how to design a solid architecture that ties the many parts of an enterprise website together, including the database, your servers and clients, and other services as well. Many Rails developers think that planning for scale is unnecessary. But there's nothing worse than an application that fails because it can't handle sudden success. Throughout this book, you'll work on an example enterprise project to learn first-hand what's involved in architecting serious web applications. With this book, you
Building for scale requires more work up front, but you'll have a flexible website that can be extended easily when your needs change. Enterprise Rails teaches you how to architect scalable Rails applications from the ground up.

Genres: Programming, Technical, Computers

350 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2008

Reviews

[David Dikman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Being from 2009 a lot of things has changed since. SOA has been replaced with micro-services and REST has definitely overtaken XML-RPC or SOAP leaving portions of the book a bit irrelevant.

That being said, the arguments he proposes for the techniques can equally be applied to these new kids on the block and it is an interesting comparison over 10 years, showing how things change.

Too much is focused on database design and practical implementation rather than patterns of how to scale applications I felt but the almost 1/3 focussed on caching is still very relevant and applicable across languages and frameworks.

I'm glad I read it although I won't be able it all.

[Tim Tilberg · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was written in the Rails 2 era, but it is timeless. It doesn't focus on Rails as much as it focusses on application and database design in the context of Rails. Surely there's a lot of new technology and methodology since this was written, but the things Dan Chak describes are still on-point. I'd love an updated version of this book, but it's still very recommendable in 2020.

[Peter Rybarczyk · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good enough.
Covers most of the important topics on at beginner level. It could be 5 stars a few years ago, but right now it is outdated in many aspects so only 3. But still, if you have some time it's worth of reading (just skip outdates parts ;))

[Barry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Top points:
- WADL/WSDL
- Shortcomings of ActiveRecord
- SOAP/XML/RPC/REST compared
- Strong points of Postgresql and misuse of MySQL
- Database Caching: memcache

Not covered:
- Web caching
- Disaster Recovery
- Other enterprise databases such as Oracle, DB2
- Recent merging of MERB and Rails

[Robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very, very good book on the issues that enterprise application architectures need to address. Well worth reading, even if you are not interested in ruby!