Sebastopol, CA—What does it take to develop an enterprise application with Rails? Enterprise Rails (O'Reilly, US $44.99) by Dan Chak 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.
"Rails is now out of its toddler phase," says Chak. "Struggling apps can no longer blame their woes on the newness of Rails. For Rails to not get labeled as a prototyping environment, Rails applications need to get more sophisticated, just as their Java predecessors did over the last decade."
Chak adds, "There is a lot the Rails community can gain from the patterns found in large enterprise applications. For whatever reason, many in the community disparage anything with the word "enterprise" in it. At the same time, Rails is disparaged as being slow and having issues with scaling. Of course, it's not Rails itself that isn't scaling, but rather some of the software being written with Rails. My book rediscovers for Rails patterns found in large successful systems, and shows how Rails applications should be structured to take advantage of these patterns."
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 Enterprise Rails, readers 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 the result is 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.
For a review copy or more information please email kathrynb@oreilly.com. Please include your delivery address and contact information.
Dan Chak is now investigating the Internet’s next big challenges. You can hear his thoughts on his blog at http://blog.chak.org.
Additional Resources:For more information about the book, including table of contents, index, author bios, and cover graphic, see the catalog page for Enterprise Rails
Enterprise Rails
Dan Chak
ISBN: 9780596515201, 350 pages, Book Price: $44.99 USD, £27.99 GBP
PDF Price: $35.99 USD
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