Service-oriented design with Ruby and Rails

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1. bigbentoDec 2011
   One of the things I love about Sinatra is that pretty much everything you need to know is in the README. Otherwise, understanding how Rack/your web server/your gems work is useful. From another angle, Paul Dix's Service-Oriented Design with Ruby and Rails has a lot of examples of using Sinatra in a variety of applications.
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2. maxdemarziJul 2011
   Sinatra with Ruby. Pretty good play by play instructions on Paul Dix book Service-Oriented Design with Ruby and Rails

   http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0321659368/1n9867a-20

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3. equalarrowJul 2011
   I'm working at a company right now that have a very big Rails stack. Hundreds of models, probably thousands of files (not including plugins and gems) across the whole app. They are experiencing scaling issues but not for requests per second, but for developer productivity.

   I'm reading a great book called Service-Oriented Design with Ruby and Rails, by Paul Dix. He states a lot of the issues that our team is running into with a monolithic app. Seems also that these issues can apply to other frameworks outside of Rails (I've run into some of these same issues years ago with Java web apps).

   The main point of the book is figuring out how to abstract out various layers of the app into standalone services. I've talked to people about this and a lot of the time they recoil at the fact that you would increase the complexity of the app by adding yet more parts (services) that require separate machines, deployment dependencies, and their own data stores. However, looking at big sites like Amazon or Twitter shows how one needs and can break apart their systems to make it easier for developers to focus on particular pieces as well as increase system performance.

   I'm going to be joining a new startup this year as the technology lead and all these things are on the table. I'm evaluating node, some NoSQL dbs, some cloud paas', etc. I'm also going to be designing from the beginning fast fail and services - or at least an architecture that makes it fairly easy to start migrating parts of the system over to their own standalone services should the need arise. I don't think you can plan for everything, but with the way technology is moving forward and the tools available today, you need to keep SOA at least in the back of your mind.

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4. freddealmeidaFeb 2011
   I would suggest you start with the core book:

   --Agile Web Development with Rails (Fourth Edition)

   --Rails Tutorial w. Rails 3 is very good.

   --Beginning Rails 3 by Carneiro and Barazi is excellent

   --The Rails 3 Way by Fernandez is difficult if not expanding

   --Service-Oriented Design with Ruby and Rails by Dix is impressive and thorough

   --Rails Antipatterns is a great look at refactoring Ruby

   --Refactoring by Fields, Harview, Fowler, Beck is good.

   --Metaprogramming in ruby by Perrotta is exciting.

   These are specifically Rails 3 (or touch on it). There are many more great books.

   I'm also a large fan of peepcode and expect more rails 3 content coming in the following months (weeks?)

   Hartl has created a series of videos worth watching (though I have not bought them yet). But if they are anything like his books then you can expect excellent quality for the price.

   My suggestion is to look at supporting technologies while you are learning ruby and rails. Such as Jquery, backbone.js or mustache.js which will give you supporting templates.

   Also pick up the rspec book and the git book and try to integrate this into your coding practices.

   Goodluck

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