Hexagonal Rails

In the early days of a project, Rails absolutely dazzles.

Tragically, the very same forces that make it so easy to add new features to a brand new Rails application are the ones that start to hold you back as the number of features grows.

Your test suite gets slower and slower, and refactoring becomes more and more of a chore. Everything seems coupled together, and it's hard to see much of a structure other than the MVC triad.

In this talk, Matt explains why this happens, and shows you a way out, using a ports-and-adapters or hexagonal architecture to introduce a separation between your application's domain logic, and the Rails framework.

This talk is suitable for advanced Rubyists who want to enjoy the benefits of Ruby's great Object-Oriented and functional programming features in their Rails applications.

Transcript

1. @mattwynne GoRuCo, 23rd June 2012 Hexagonal Rails
6. Caveat
9. and then...
11. Why?
13. Connected
14. Modular
17. Modular, in the large
19. What does it do?
20. Web UI API Project Topic Publisher User Membership
21. No, What does it do?
22. Metaphor
23. Librarian Bouncer Web UI Controllers API Project Topic Publisher User Membership
24. Librarian Bouncer Web UI Controllers API Project Topic Publisher User Membership
25. Modular, in the small
26. Protocols
28. Your domain model is not in your classes, it's in the communication patterns between the objects at runtime. — Steve Freeman & Nat Price
29. Your domain model is not where you think it is
30. Your domain model is in the protocols
32. Responsibility- Driven Design
34. http://www.flickr.com/photos/scania/2869194523/sizes/l/in/photostream/
35. Designing Protocols
36. Procedural code gets information then makes decisions. Object-oriented code tells objects to do things. — Alec Sharp, Smalltalk by Example Tell, don't ask
37. Example: Passive Controller
47. Organization Creator Controller User Organization User Interface
48. Organization Creator Controller User Organization User Interface Feed Writer ActivityFeed
49. WDYT?
50. Pattern Wankery?
51. Snake Oil?
52. Java?
54. Let's explore!
55. References http://www.threeriversinstitute.org/blog/?p=338 http://www.growing-object-oriented-software.com/ http://pragprog.com/articles/tell-dont-ask http://alistair.cockburn.us/Hexagonal+architecture http://devblog.avdi.org/2012/03/15/now-available-objects-on-rails/ http://mattwynne.net/category/hexagonal-rails/ http://www.wirfs-brock.com/PDFs/How%20Designs%20Differ.pdf http://nccastaff.bournemouth.ac.uk/jmacey/CA1/Papers/Responsibility-Driven%20Design.pdf