MWRC 2011 - SOA and the Monolithic Rails App Anti-Pattern
Channel: Confreaks
Date: 2015-02-17

By, Chris Wyckoff
Ruby on Rails is a wonderful framework that makes creating websites simple and fun. But, perhaps because it is a pleasure to work with, Rails can be overused. A simple CRUD application can quickly become a behemoth, it's responsibilities encompassing far more functionality than one application should. In the startup world, one such app can run an entire business. Monolithic Rails applications are an anti-pattern that hamper productivity, increase bugs, and, if you are a startup, can threaten your business. How do you fix the problem? Decompose your application into several independent, reusable services. This talk relates my experience leading a team of developers who re-architected a monolithic Rails app -- an app that effectively was the business -- into a service-oriented architecture (SOA). Using targeted code examples, it seeks to describe not only the advantages of a service-oriented approach, but also techniques for refactoring a production application into a more distributed architecture without destroying the business in the process. Finally, this talk highlights some common SOA pitfalls and describes effective ways to avoid or remedy them. Attendees will walk away with a clear demonstration of how to refactor or think about building their app with SOA in mind.

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