There has been a lot of “buzz” around Ruby on Rails for a while now. I have been following it since it hit the street. I have to admit I have not done much with Rails except for reading and dreaming about it, but I hope to work with it someday. However, in the back of my mind, I always wondered if I could build a real world application using this framework. Now a day, everyone is building so called “Enterprise” (What is enterprise anyways?) applications. If I use Rails, can I say my application is enterprise ready?
I came across Jay Field’s post on Rails: Enterprise Ready. One of the points he made in his post is that RoR right out of the box might not solve your problem (I do not think any framework can), but it can be easily extended. Being easily extended is the key to any useful and sucessful framework.
Besides all the enterprise worthyness stuff, I also found Jay’s approach to unit testing interesting. On top of the MVC layer, he inserted a Presenter abstraction in between the view and the controller. The Presenter will be responsible for maintaining data for the view to consume. Normally the controller would be responisble for this which might make testing a little bit messy. Since the presenter maintains the data, it can be tested independently. Of course the draw back is having to create and maintain a separate class.
He also mentioned all his unit tests run in less than a second. Assuming he has more than a couple hundred tests, that number is amazingly fast! One of the reasons he is able to achieve those numbers is because none of his tests actually hit the database. This reminds me, our unit tests are running way too slow right now mostly because a lot of tests hit the database (especially when we run it on Oracle, it is killing me). I am going to take off my RoR hat and try to see if I can make our tests faster :-)