Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Dan Chak has written a really excellent introduction to enterprise web application architecture, and a worthy candidate for your technical bookshelf.
Calling it "Enterprise Rails" is a bit misleading, though. Rails only makes fleeting appearances. There's a great introduction to Rails plugin writing, which rightfully urges developers to move any decorator code to plugin modules. He talks a little about segmenting class files along Physical, Logical and Service boundaries, the point of which I have yet to understand completely. And there's a chapter on pushing Rails' application-layer polymorphism down to the data layer, which is good advice, but more on that later.
The bulk of Enterprise Rails is devoted to building a solid data layer. Again, good advice. The Rails team decided that referential integrity and validation belongs in the application layer, which Chak contends is dangerous (and I believe him). However, this is where things start to get a little hairy - enforcing referential integrity and validation in the data layer requires an early and continued adherence to SQL, and Chak makes it clear that any old SQL won't do: it's PostgreSQL or nothing.
This makes fully half of the book a dissertation on SQL domain description language from the Postgre perspective, domain data, third normal form and other data layer topics. I have greatly enjoyed the introduction to Postgres DDL, but it wasn't exactly what I expected from a Rails book.
The last few chapters are mostly about Service Oriented Architecture (which I suspect is why most people buy this book) and caching. Chak shows why he's an expert in enterprise software architecture here. But again, he takes a decidedly anti-Rails approach, emphasizing ActionWebService and XML-RPC. This is not without reason - nearly every language has an XML-RPC library. But ActionWebService, as Chak notes, isn't part of core Rails any longer.
REST is quickly reviewed, then mostly dismissed. There's a cursory example of a RESTful service. ActiveResource, Rails' useful core module for REST-oriented SOA, is never mentioned.
Pretty much every time Rails comes up in Enterprise Rails (which, as we've seen, isn't often), it's an opportunity for Chak to take it down a peg. Well, Rails deserves it. But I think that slapping the word "Rails" on the book cover is has more to do with marketing than anything else. This is really a tale about data modeling for the enterprise, with an emphasis on Postgre, told by an expert.
I'd say that this is required reading for enterprise developers, but don't take the "Rails" part of the title too seriously.
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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 will:
Tour an ideal enterprise systems layout: how Rails fits in, and which elements don't rely on Rails
Learn to structure a Rails 2.0 application for complex websites
Discover how plugins can support reusable code and improve application clarity
Build a solid data model--a fortress--that protects your data from corruption
Base an ActiveRecord model on a database view, and build support for multiple table inheritance
Explore service-oriented architecture and web services with XML-RPC and REST
See how caching can be a dependable way to improve performance
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.
