Ruby on Rails or simply Rails is a server-side web application framework. The language used is Ruby and it is under the MIT license. So, you can design your web pages, web service, or a database using this model-view-controller framework. You can improve the performance using many well-known paradigms and software engineering patterns such as active record pattern, don’t repeat yourself, and convention over configuration.
Use The Brakeman
The brakeman is a security analysis tool. When you run it, all the possible vulnerabilities are brought out after it runs through your application. The security warnings will be grouped according to their severity – High, Medium, and Low. Sometimes, you may not have any warnings but that does not mean your system is secure. This is because brakeman at times overlooks some of the basic security pitfalls. To make sure you have the security issue under control, use a second gem called the bundler-audit. This checks the security in your Gemfile.lock for all variable versions of gems.
Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY)
Every large software project is overwhelmingly complex. Most of us are not good at handling the complexities. The strategy for reducing the complexity is to divide the code into portions where each component represents a subsystem. This subsystem accomplishes everything you need in some specific segment.
Take the case where you are building a content management system. You can keep subdividing the portions into components such as user management which has a subsystem role management. When you reach the component that has a single responsibility we implement it in a class. This is assuming that we are building something using the object-oriented application.
The DRY principles states that you can only use these pieces of knowledge exactly once in the entire system. This unambiguous unique representation shows how we achieve something.
Use The Bullet
In the development process of the application, without the use of refactoring, you cannot spot the N+1 problems. But, this is a common occurrence in Rails. This means when an object is called a second object is also called. This results in a second query. This thing becomes huge and you find that instead of running 1 query with 100 results, you may be having 100 queries and trying to get one result. Because you use a tiny dataset, this thing is difficult to see. It only becomes apparent when moving to a database that is production sized.
To avoid this problem, we use eager loading. You use. include on querying code. The way to do this is to use the Bullet gem and this will clear all your N+1 queries. It works out of the box and you only need to install the app. It will visit the various routes in the development and you get alert boxes with messages that pop out when there are database queries.
Traceroute
You can clean the routes in Rail applications with this Traceroute tool. It will detect routes mapped to non-existing controller actions and finalize those applications that are not reachable. This simple rake task will thus eliminate needles time and effort. The controller helper methods both before and after filters must remain private because they will not figure in the public API. Even though this works fine, at times on mountable engines at time it shows false positive but you can see them and overlook those that are not true.
You can use many other principles such as YAGNI (You aint gonna need it) or the Deadweight tool. They function seamlessly once you download the tool and begin to run them. You see how to improve the speed of your Rail by using these simple tools. If you have any doubts about which one is the most appropriate, consult any web designer to clear your doubt.
