In our last post, we examined the most common ways to organize business logic in Ruby on Rails. They all have advantages and drawbacks, and essentially, most do not leverage the full power of Object Oriented Programming in Ruby. This time, we will introduce another alternative that more naturally fits the mental models we apply when reasoning about the behavior of our applications: DCI.
With its strong emphasis on convention over configuration, Ruby on Rails has counteracted many architectural considerations that caused bikeshedding when building web applications. Still, one area that has continuously piqued developers' interest is how to handle business logic, i.e., code that epitomizes "what an app does." Another way to phrase this question is: Where do we put all the transactional code?
If you’ve ever looked at the Request for Comments (RFCs) around sending and receiving emails, you’ll see the technical complications involved when hitting send in your email inbox. Thankfully, many existing tools provide the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) service for us developers — from a Postfix server you manage to a fully scalable sending service such as SendGrid, Amazon SES, or Postmark.
An audit log is a documented record of events and activity within an information technology system. Audit logging is critical for application owners and administrators to track activity within their systems. In this post, we'll first dive into what auditing entails and what to consider when audit logging. We'll then explore some options for implementing audit logs, including PaperTrail, Audited, AuditLog, AppSignal, and a custom implementation. Let's get started!
Feature flags are used all across the tech industry to test code at scale; this article explores how to integrate them into your Ruby on Rails application using the Flipper gem.
When it comes to building an API, Rails is an extremely popular programming language choice to build powerful RESTful APIs. In this tutorial, we will build a simple REST API using Rails. The Rails REST API endpoint will allow users to retrieve a credit score rating. Of course, we won’t be linking up to any backend systems to pull a credit score but will instead use a random number generator to generate the score and return it to the user.
Most people only realize the necessity of logs when they need them the most. But when your application breaks, user complaints start flooding in, and you have no clue how to fix it, it's too late to add some log messages that might have helped. Good logs pay for themselves tenfold. They make it a breeze to diagnose those tricky bugs, and if you do logs right, they can alert you of issues even before your users notice. But what does it mean to 'do logging right'?
Kredis (Keyed Redis) is a recent addition to the Rails developer's toolkit. It strives to simplify storing and accessing structured data on Redis. In this first part of a two-part series, we'll start by going into how Kredis works. We'll then run through an example use case for storing ephemeral UI state using a bespoke Redis key. Let's get started!
Rails 7 was a welcome release that brought a lot of significant features and changes. On the backend, Rails 7 introduced asynchronous query loading and Zeitwerk for autoloading. The frontend saw Hotwire becoming the default solution for new Rails apps. Rails 7.1 will add to these notable features. In this post, we'll discuss some noteworthy additions that are likely to be shipped.
Views in Rails don't do much besides showcasing what we want. Sure, they might render slightly different results depending on who's watching (an admin or a logged-in user has a different experience than a guest user, for example), but they don't do much processing on what they're given. Or at least they shouldn't. Often though, Rails projects wind up with a lot of logic in their views. In this post, we'll explore how to use Rails helpers to keep our views clean and readable.
