Given Enough Money, All Bugs Are Shallow

- Jeff Atwood
- April 3, 2015
- Uncategorized

Eric Raymond, in The Cathedral and the Bazaar, famously wrote

Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.

The idea is that open source software, by virtue of allowing anyone and everyone to view the source code, is inherently less buggy than closed source software. He dubbed this “Linus’s Law”.

Insofar

Rails 4 Engines

February 12, 2014

At TaskRabbit, we have gone through a few iterations on how we make our app(s). In the beginning, there was the monolithic Rails app in the standard way with 100+ models and their many corresponding controllers and views. Then we moved to several apps with their own logic and often using the big one via API. Our newest project is a single “app” made up of several Rails engines. We have found that this strikes a great balance between the (initial) straightforwardness of the single Rails app and the modularity of the more service-oriented architecture.

We’ve talked about this approach with a few people and they often ask very specific questions about the tactics used to make this happen, so let’s go through it here and via a sample application.

Rails Engines

Rails Engines is basically a whole Rails app that lives in the container of another one. Put another way, as the docs note: an app itself is basically just an engine at the root level. Over the years, we’ve seen sen engines as parts of gems such as devise or rails_admin. These example show the power of engines by providing a large set of relatively self-contained functionality “mounted” into an app.

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