Growing Rails Applications in Practice

We'd like to show you one path to write Rails apps that are a joy to understand and change, even as your team and codebase grows. This book describes a complete toolbox that has served us well for all requirements that we have encountered.

But before we do that, we need to let you in on an inconvenient secret: Large applications are large. The optimal implementation of a large application will always be more complex than the optimal representation of a smaller app. We cannot make this go away. What we can do is to organize a codebase in a way that "scales logarithmically". Twice as many models should not mean twice as many problems.

To accomplish this, you don't necessarily need to change the entire way your application is built. You don't necessarily need to introduce revolutionary architectures to your code. You can probably make it with the tools built into Rails, if you use them in a smarter way.

Compare this to sorting algorithms. When a sorting function is too slow, our first thought is not "install a Hadoop cluster". Instead we simply look for an algorithm that scales better. In a similar fashion this book is not about revolutionary design patterns or magic gems that make all your problems go away. Instead we will show how to use discipline, consistency and organization to make your application grow more gently.