The day has just started and I already feel tired. As I sip my morning coffee and the haze begins to dissipate, I think of the day ahead. The things I have to do. Work, study, chores, and responsibilities. The list goes on.
To organize my day I write a checklist of the things I need to do. It felt good to cross out each task as the day went on. But after a while I came to a dreadful realization: not only do I struggle to finish everything, but my checklist becomes longer and longer.
Fukashima Island, also known as Cat Island, is home to more cats than humans. NHK World (Japan) released a great documentary about the island and its inhabitants titled “Raising a Family on Cat Island“.
Centuries ago, this island was a bustling fishing village. Today, less than 20 people remain, and their numbers continue to dwindle each year because of emigration or old age. Due to the lack of children staying in the island, the schools already closed decades ago, and children have to go to the mainland by boat in order to continue their studies.
In Part 1 we created a simple library called KantanLogicthat we can use to manage application logic in lieu of other popular libraries. Our library has these main features:
In our last example, we have a class called CreateAccount that creates a user account and sends a welcome email. When using KantanLogic, the service looks like this:
In the Ruby programming language, there are many libraries that can be used to manage business or application logic. Some of the popular ones are dry-rb (framework-agnostic) and ActiveInteraction (used within the Rails framework). The strengths and weaknesses of these libraries are explored in more detail on another article.
While these are great libraries to use and provide enormous benefits to your code architecture, some consideration is needed before using them:
Rails is an awesome web application framework and it used by a lot of companies to ship features fast and iterate quickly. Developers also love the ecosystem and the stability that the framework offers. But it is not without its criticisms. One of them, which I experienced in my professional work as well, is its lack of direction on how to structure business logic.
The introduction of Concerns provided another layer where this logic can be extracted from models and controllers, but I think that this is still lacking, especially as the complexity of the application grows over time.