This was a great read from David Bryant Copeland. I was hoping to learn how I could lead projects at my work to make them more sustainable, but I felt that this book was more for green-field projects than 13 year old monoliths.
The key take-aways I got were:
- Giving developers choice for how to organize and architect code will lead to many different ways to accomplish the same goal. Set a golden path and stick to it.
- Rails provides many fundamental objects for building webapps. The book
suggests treating these objects (Controllers, Models, Jobs, etc) as shims,
while using Service objects to house actual business logic.
- Validations can live in the Model because the abstraction is so good.
- But real restrictions should be duplicated in the database itself.
- Don’t trust Validations to ensure data integrity.
- Business logic should expose behavior. It works with data to achieve a goal.
- Use Thread local storage for context like
current_user.
- Validations can live in the Model because the abstraction is so good.
- The author suggests that your routes should only contain
resourcecalls, except for vanity URL’s.- A vanity URL redirects to one of the resource URL’s, or renders a route directly.
- Use semantic HTML for components, then style with
<div>,<span>, etc.
I can’t say I understand or agree with all of these conclusions, but I believe they would make a solid framework for a new application.