Enterprise Recipes with Ruby and Rails [Paperback]

Maik Schmidt (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 24, 2008

Enterprise Recipes with Ruby and Rails helps you to overcome typical obstacles hidden in every enterprise's infrastructure. It doesn't matter if your Rails application needs to access your company's message-oriented middleware or if it has to scan through tons of huge XML documents to get a missing piece of data. Ruby and Rails enable you to create solutions that are both elegant and efficient.

With more than 50 concise, targeted recipes, this book shows you how to use existing infrastructure to develop effectively for the enterprise. For example, Ruby is an excellent language for manipulating both textual and binary data. This is enormously useful, because typical enterprise software is about storing and processing huge amounts of data. You'll learn how to process data in various popular data formats such as XML, CSV, fixed length records, and JSON.

This book covers the whole spectrum of distributed application technologies, ranging from simple socket-based servers to full-blown Service Oriented Architectures. In addition, Ruby is a perfect ally when you have to integrate with RESTful and SOAP services, or when you have to access message-oriented middleware. It even helps you to reuse your existing C/C++, Java, or .NET code with ease.

Since the advent of the Web, many enterprises have opened their internal services to the outside world to participate in the rapidly growing world of e-commerce. As an enterprise programmer you'd better learn how to use existing payment gateways and how to implement security mechanisms to protect your company's data and your customers' privacy, and this book shows you how.

Enterprise programming is not only about developing huge software projects but also about maintaining and operating them. You'll save a lot of valuable time if you document your software (of course, automatically) and automate tedious and recurring tasks, such as monitoring your servers and testing your programs. Enterprise Recipes with Ruby and Rails covers these major enterprise concerns, giving you tools and knowledge you'll turn to over and over.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Maik Schmidt has worked as a software developer for more than 15 years, creating solutions for large enterprises. He frequently writes book reviews and articles and is the author of Enterprise Recipes with Ruby and Rails and Enterprise Integration with Ruby.

Product Details

• Paperback: 425 pages
• Publisher: Pragmatic Bookshelf (November 24, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1934356239
• ISBN-13: 978-1934356234
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 7.6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #447,105 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

My first computer was a Commodore C64---I got it around 1982---and I loved to play Frogger like all the other kids did. But I was also curious how all that stuff worked. I was about ten when I learned both Basic and 6502 assembler to write my own computer games. Since then not many days have passed without touching a keyboard. It became clear to me very early that I'd like to make a living from programming. Since 1993 I've worked as a software developer and consultant. I also create Open Source software.

I still love creating software as much as I did on the first day, but I also wanted to do something different. Some years ago I started to write book reviews and articles for computer science magazines. "Enterprise Integration with Ruby" is my first book. It will certainly not be my last.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Ruby and Rails recipes far beyond "Hello world", December 25, 2008

By 

Vladimir Dobriakov (Kaarst, NRW) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Enterprise Recipes with Ruby and Rails (Paperback)

The book is build out of about 50, thorough researched, real world enterprise recipes.

While scenarios are easy to comprehend, they go far beyond the "hello world" and show real world challenges, a developer is facing in a legacy software landscape:

* processing (huge) XML files

* handling other data formats like CVS and JSON

* authenticating via LDAP

* bulk loading data into a relational database - with or without validation

* SOAP

* JMS and other message brokers

* RMI

There is also other shiny legacy-free world, where you build a new, at first glance, a stand alone application. But reality is, even for this you need a lot of integration:

* payments with paypal, credit cards

* generating secure but easy to remember passwords

* integrate with C or C++ libraries

Important topic is maintenance of your application and writing applications, that are easy to maintain. Recipes include:

* testing and user stories

* getting documentation for free

* creating daemons

* monitoring with monit

* using own generators

While you will need to play around with mentioned libraries, read rdoc and sometimes probably dive into the source code of the libraries, the recipes in this book will give you a head start. In 15 minutes you will get a feeling for particular solution approach and learn to deal with the most problems expecting you.

In my opinion it is great value for money.

5.0 out of 5 stars A versatile, top pick for any computer library, May 11, 2009

By 

Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Enterprise Recipes with Ruby and Rails (Paperback)

Over 50 'recipes' shows hot to blend existing legacy code using Ruby and Ruby on Rails, and how to create new applications based on existing models. Learn how to process a range of data pieces in all kinds of formats from XML to fixed-length records using a guide that even helps reuse existing C, C++, Java and other codes. A versatile, top pick for any computer library.

0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars recipes for ...small enterprises?, May 12, 2009

By 

Harry Hirsch (Frankfurt) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Enterprise Recipes with Ruby and Rails (Paperback)

After reading this book I've got the impression, that Ruby on Rails doesn't really match the needs of a large enterprise infrastructure. I really love Rails for web applications and its ease of use is also very nice when developing a prototype in an enterprise. For such use-cases this book provides just the right examples.

But when you think of long-time maintenance, modularization, high-availability, or processing large amounts of data, this book can't help you.