As Rails continues to gain popularity, and the community behind it matures, Rails is thrust into domains of increasing complexity. As anyone who’s been developing in Rails for a while knows, Ruby and Rails are particularly good tools for modeling this complexity. However, very little emphasis has been placed on how to *manage* this complexity. “Domain-Driven Design” is a set of principles, patterns, and practices (detailed in a book of the same name) that help developers manage the complexity that comes along with working on large projects in interesting domains. The two ideas that I will focus on are Aggregates and Bounded Contexts. I will cover such topics as 1) your 1400 line user.rb - why it sucks and what to do about it, 2) management in the small: breaking up objects, designing aggregates, or, why not all entities are created equal, and 3) management in the large: identifying bounded contexts. This talk is intended for developers working on longer-term, larger applications that are running in production and providing value to the business. I think the ideas in it start to become useful when a Rails app hits the 10k line mark, and are crucial for managing complexity beyond the 30k line mark. It’s an advanced topic and is meant as high-level design and architecture (implemented in real code though!!)
alohaonrails.com/sessions/#domain-driven-rails
Mahalo to ThinkTech Hawaii (thinktechhawaii.com) and Panopto (panopto.com) for their video recording services.