Tag: Ruby on Rails

This last year has seen continuing maturation of Ruby on Rails with Ruby 2.6 and Rails 6.0. Ruby 2.6 included an initial release of JIT compilation for YARV, and Rails 6.0 adopts Webpacker as the default JavaScript asset manager instead of Sprockets. Ruby, however, continues increasingly overshadowed by JavaScript and Python, and Rails is challenged by the popularity of microservices and Node. Neither Matz’s mruby 2.0 nor Crystal have gained widespread attention, but at least AWS Lambda Ruby support and FaastRuby are now available.

At a practical level, for our mature in-house codebase a switch to microservices is not necessary or cost effective. This year, however, has seen Stephan Hagemann’s ‘Component Based Rails Applications’ ebook published (endorsed) as a softback by Addison Wesley and a very similar approach embraced by Shopify. Our own internal codebase remains ~60% gemified from 2017 in a simple layered architecture while we have focused on consistently packaging business logic using interactors (service objects) for both foreground and background processes.

New gems (to us) used this year included roxml, and replacing the unmaintained god process monitor with eye. On the open source side I stepped back from contributing to ActiveAdmin and published instead a couple of API clients for AmEx and PayPal.

Year 8 with Rails for me has been an unglamorous affair of maintenance upgrades (Ruby 2.3, Rails 5.x), refactors and bug fixes.

It has been discouraging to see StackOverflow characterize Ruby as shrinking and unpopular and compare Ruby on Rails with ASP.net. Nate Berkopec’s findings that vanilla Rails apps are perfectly capable of 1,000 requests/minute is cold comfort in the face of shrinking developer mindshare: this decline has real consequences in terms of open source contributions and Ruby gem maintenance.

On the other hand Ruby remains #4 on Github and developers are still very much in demand. JavaScript continues ascendant but Derek Prior of Thoughtbot has mentioned cooling enthusiasm for Elixir, and Go too has slid in popularity, at least according to TIOBE. Crystal 1.0 remains delayed. An experimental JIT has now shipped for YARV foreshadowing further performance improvements in Ruby 2.6.

On the Rails front end Basecamp continued their contrarian tradition by offering Stimulus.js as a more limited and pragmatic alternative to React’s dominant framework. The Majestic Monolith remains relevant for smaller businesses and early stage startups despite ambitious engineers everywhere (myself included) wanting to use the same tech stack as the largest, most successful companies from Apple, Salesforce and Netflix to… Twitter. At Railsconf GitHub, now owned my Microsoft, recommitted to easier scalability enhancements for Rails 6.

On the infrastructure side the Docker ecosystem has continued to mature with the embrace of Kubenetes at Dockercon EU in Oct ’17. It has also been good to see a more enlightened approach to open source by AWS with EKS and ApacheMQ.

At my employer we continue to support a somewhat modular monolith with a 50 kloc monorepo, 40 ActiveAdmin resources, 60 background jobs, 70 direct and 240 total gem dependencies. We have fully caught up with Rails 5.2 and edged forward with Ruby 2.3 for Bootsnap support and React-Apollo 1.x. Procedural code has continued to migrate to standardized Interactors. New gems used included Bootsnap, Combustion, Dalli (memcached) and AWS SDK v3 SQS, S3, SES & SNS.

What has Rails 5.x brought us? More secure controller parameters, still scarily subvertible by less experienced developers, but at least awareness has been raised. More restricted autoloading, for the best. Better callback management, though we try to avoid them as much as possible. Bootsnap with a significant improvement in startup times, yay!

Open source contributions this year have included a couple of minor ActiveAdmin releases including Rails 5.2 support and various PRs for the AuthorizeNet Ruby SDK.

AWS features I have been working more with this year have included ClassicLink, private subnets, piculet, Data Pipeline and managed SSL certs. Concerns over production container management have been mitigated with a mass of metrics collection with CloudWatch, Librato and Skylight.

What will the next year bring? A pragmatically managed evolution towards ‘mini-services’, Rails 6 with polished multi-database support, Ruby 2.6 with improving JIT support, Webpack as the default JavaScript handler and increasing adoption of Kubernetes.

Tuesday 17 April. Snow. DHH poking fun at Twitter and raising alarms about Facebook. Nick Quaranto with a GraphQL intro: best for new APIs as a mobile backend. Sean Griffin trying to encourage Rails contributions by labeling it a legacy app. Fastly presenting their not yet released alternative to docker-compose for developers. Olivier Lacan talking about the life and imminent death of CodeSchool.com. Taylor Jones with an introductory overview of Webpacker. Akira Matsuda teasing with his unfinished performance hack gems. Mark Imbriaco with a stellar career from AOL to Decisiv, 37signals, Heroku, Living Social (with Chad Fowler), GitHub, Digital Ocean and Pivotal.

Wednesday. Eileen Uchitelle keynote on upcoming Rails 6 features for scalability: baked in parallel tests (minitest) and polished multi-database support. Initially skeptical but ultimately inspired by her appeal for more companies to upstream their work. Justin Searles and Ted Kaufman talking about growing their agency. Chris Hoffman reviewing Optoro’s experiences adopting services: start with new business services, not an extraction, do something large enough to be noticed but as simple as possible, establish infrastructure standards and have developers support their services. Exhibition hall with booths by BTCOTC, Procore, GitHub, Heroku, Engine Yard, Cloud 66, Shopify, Scribd and LendingHome amongst others. After lunch James Adam recounting his struggle to popularize Rails engines and the forces shaping the framework’s evolution. Leanardo Targon of Plataformatic with an introduction to Warden. Admin frameworks BOF discussing modular monoliths, TrailBlazer and CBRA. Lightening talks including Clearwater and jsonapi-suite

Thursday. Snow again and chill winds. Sarah Mei filling in a keynote for Bari Williams: application development is interior decorating, not architecture. Sam Phippen with another well presented RSpec talk with the latest fixes to support system tests. Graham Conzett reminding how much can still be done with UJS alone. After lunch Ariel Caplan introduction to Swagger (OpenAPI) and (unmaintained?) apivore, Michael Crismali giving a quick review of JavaScript strategies, followed by Ross Kaffenberger giving actionable advice on dealing with Webpack. Finally Aaron Patterson proposing to upstream easier performance tuning into Rails.

Attendance looked up (2,000+), and more diverse.  No more ‘Rails is dying’ and React/Elixir FOMO. Webpack/services/JSONAPI for sure, but not too much beyond that.  Standards of the technical talks were good, especially Akira and Eileen. I missed the talks by Vladimir Dementyev and Justin Weiss and I look forward to the inspiring videos of Ernie Miller and Nicolas Means.

Tuesday. Day 1. Keynote by DHH on belief systems. Fascinating talk by Lance Ivy on JSON Web Tokens, Justin Weiss on sessions, Dave Tapley with an entertaining exploration of VueJS, ActionCable and image processing. Eileen Uchitelle with a much anticitpated presentation on adding a significant feature (SystemTestCases) to Rails. Alex Kitchens with a great primer on using Git to explore the history of the Rails codebase. Finally Sam Phippen, now with Digital Ocean, in much better health than last year, giving an upbeat tour of fixing some RSpec issues.

Wednesday. Day 2. Justin Searles keynote with a tongue-in-cheek programmer personality test inspired by Myers Biggs. Back to back presentations on Elm, Phoenix, React and Helix highlighting various Rails related technologies. Nate Berkopec with clear and practical guidance on configuring app servers on Heroku or elsewhere. Evening lightening talks, most notably Isaac Sloan building a Crystal Kemal blog in five minutes.

Thursday. Three talks on distributed teams, including Maria Gutierrez, Glenn Vanderburg, formerly of Living Social, and David Copeland of Stich Fix. Simon Enskilden on the decision at Shopify to embrace flash sales and scale from MySQL sharding to multi-datacenter ‘pods’. Tony Drake pitching his active_reporting gem, then Nate Berkopec and Eilieen Uchitelle again with Rafael Franca and Richard Schneeman on a performance panel before the final keynote from Aaron Patterson with his traditional trolling of DHH and, eventually, h2o with Rack 3.0.

In my sixth year with Rails the Ruby community has been experiencing a sea change: gem innovation has peaked and leading Rails developers have been moving on to JavaScript 6 Node, Dockerized microservices in Go, functional Clojure on the JVM or highly concurrent Elixir Phoenix on the fault tolerant Erlang VM. Despite these defections Ruby adoption has resurged (as, coincidentally, has Java) given new versions that have improved garbage collection and performance. Rails 5 has embraced concurrent-ruby and websockets, while HTTP/2 looks set to drive further significant change to all web application frameworks in the near future.

Meanwhile our in-house multi-currency e-commerce solution has grown to 45kloc, 2,100 tests and nearly 100 gem dependencies thanks to ever expanding integration with fraud detection services, fulfillment providers, payment gateways, email marketing solutions and an autodialer. Between daily business requirements we have been addressing technical debt by straggling to Ruby 2.2, Rails 4.2, RSpec 3.4 and ActiveAdmin 1.0.0.pre2. We have adopted CBRA and gemified the persistence core of the application. New gems adopted have included VCR, Wisper and React on Rails.

On the tools side this year has seen widespread adoption of Slack for distributed teams, but we have stuck with Atlasssian HipChat, configuring integration with Airbrake for production exceptions, Assembla for tickets, BitBucket for code reviews, CodeShip for CI and Coveralls for test coverage. Increasingly global sales have raised expectations of operations to provide 24×7 uptime, monitored by PagerDuty and requiring MySQL hot backups.

Why Docker? Because it promises to make dev-ops easier. Dockerizing an existing production environment is not trivial, moving development to Docker is perhaps a useful stepping stone. It might also make developer on-boarding easier but I haven’t tried that yet.

Docker can be installed on OS X in various ways, most notably Docker Toolbox or homebrew. I was previously using docker-machine with Parallels but recently I discovered Dlite which simplifies using docker by creating a local OS X docker.sock that forwards requests to the docker VM. Dlite also sets up a an NFS server that exports /Users to the VM. Instead of VirtualBox or Parallels Dlite leverages a lightweight hypervisor called xhyve which requires Yosemite and hardware virtualization support (sysctl kern.hv_support). Note that as of writing Docker for Mac and Windows in public beta is using a similar approach.

With Dlite started I can get a usable bash session with:

docker run -v /Users:/home -it ruby:2.2 bash

I can then cd to the project directory and bundle.

To run browser based tests I was previously building a docker image with Xvfb, Chrome and Selenium Server installed. Recently, however, I found a different approach that uses standalone selenium-server as another docker service. On a Mac workstation installing selenium-server as a service is as simple as

brew install selenium-server-standalone chromedriver
selenium-server

Once tests are passing with a local selenium-server then adding selenium/standalone-chrome to docker-compose.yml and running browser based tests inside the container is quite achievable. The location of the selenium-server is exported to the app container as SELENIUM_PORT, eg. tcp://172.0.0.5:4444

Wednesday. Day 1. Keynote introduction by Jeremy Daer, nee Kemper, DHH thankfully racing. Heroku presenation on Kafka, Shopify presentations on shipit-engine, request_interceptor and BuildKite, Rafael França on Sprockets, and well attended presentation by Akira Matsuda with ideas for assorted Rails performance hacks. Closing keynote from Nickolas Means with a history of Lockheed’s original skunkworks.

Thursday. Day 2. Ruby Heroes including Avdi Grimm, Charles Nutter, Akira Matsuda and Richard Schneeman. Surprisingly few vendor booths, including Indeed Prime, Hired, Skylight, RubyMine, Stitch Fix and Codacy. Rails 5 presentations on ActionCable, Turbolinks and Sean Griffin on miscellaneous enhancements. Richard Schneeman on maintaining Sprockets and David Copeland of Stitch Fix on emergent software architecture. Lightening talks on Scrivito, RocketJob, Appfolio Farcy, Railscamp, Bundler Gemstash, multi_zip, Brakeman, RubyBookClub, Reinteractive Wallaby and Benjamin Fleischer on JSONAPI.

Friday. Day 3. Aaron Patterson, now at GitHub, workshops on Hashicorp tools and RedPotion and presentations on Percy and Sandi Metz on refactoring. Paul Lamere from Spotify with a wonderful presentation on music data analytics… in Python.

P.S. I never guessed the most interesting presentation on Rails would be by Justin Searls.