14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Superb intro to enterprise web applications; a little light on Rails, April 6, 2009
This review is from: Enterprise Rails (Paperback)
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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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Not Your Typical Rails Book, December 18, 2008
This review is from: Enterprise Rails (Paperback)
Dan Chak is obviously one smart guy, and I agree with the other reviewers in that this book provides a lot of information not found in any other Rails books.
I have neither the advantage nor experience of working on a large, complex site like Amazon (where Dan worked), so for all I know maybe all of his ideas border on necessity for a site of that complexity. But there does seem to be a lot of straying from the normal philosophies espoused in virtually every other Rails book.
For example, he eschews migrations and instead does all schema manipulation via SQL DDL statements. And choosing PostgreSQL over MySQL means that on more than one occasion MySQL users are left trying to figure out how to accomplish what he has just covered.
None of which is bad; heck, Rails is Latin for "opinionated", right? But if you're in a fairly small shop working on non-Amazon-size websites (which most of them are), I question how many of these fairly complex strategies will be implemented given the perpetual "behind schedule" state we all seem to be in most of the time, not to mention the pressures of "getting something out the door" as soon as possible.
Regarding this issue, I think he himself put it best during his discussion of REST vs. XML-RPC vs. SOAP: "... we must remind ourselves that in the enterprise practicality is at least as important as purity." (Ada, anyone?)
While we all know that "pay me now or pay me later" and "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure" are absolute truths, the real world often dictates we ditch these proverbs.
Regardless, I think this book is a must-read for serious Rails developers. Dan raises a heckuva lot of good points that you won't find anywhere else.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Required reading for any rails developer, February 5, 2010
This review is from: Enterprise Rails (Paperback)
The author provides an important perspective that can easily be forgotten in the rails community. You may not put into practice everything you find in the book but it is an invaluable, intelligent description of design strategies that need to be re-aquired in the rails community if it wants to survive beyond "this is a really cool language!" ;)
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