Breaking Up Rails Monoliths and Contact-Driven API Development with Dmitry Pashkevich

1

Calendly

Dmitry: So Calendly is a Ruby on Rails application. As a core mechanism that even enables this kind of modulization, we're using Rails engines, which is a standard part of Rails. And many things under the hood in Rails are implemented as Rails engines. I'll give a brief description of what they are. They're essentially embedded Rails applications or, better said, a Rails application that is not meant to run on its own, but it's meant to be plugged into a parent application. But code-wise, you can create it in a subdirectory, and it will have the same structure that your normal Rails application has. It will have controllers, and models, and JavaScript if you want to throw it. It's all familiar, and you can test it separately. But in production, it doesn't run as a standalone service. It runs as a module plugged into your main application.

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2

Basecamp

Dmitry: Sure. And I'll preface this by saying monolithic architecture is great. It makes sense to start with, in most cases, and you can get great mileage out of it. DHH from Basecamp has a fantastic article called The Majestic Monolith something-something where he makes this point. And at Calendly, we have only started seeing the limits of the monolithic architecture maybe a couple of years ago. We are talking about growing the company for a few years to have an established place in the market with millions of users, millions of revenue. We were able to take advantage of that architecture for a very long time. And at Calendly, in general, we are very practical. We steer away from creating technical challenges just because it stimulates us intellectually.

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3

Active Admin

And then we wrote some tooling around that to essentially enable all the...Rails engines aren't really built for this kind of marginalization. Usually, Rails engines are for people to write what you can consider a Rails plugin. For example, Active Admin is implemented as a Rails engine and a number of other open-source projects out there where there's a whole pluggable piece, a mini-application that including your project may be pointed to your domain models, and it'll work. It'll have standalone pages, standalone UI that is usually implemented as a Rails engine.

#Data Dashboard #No Code #Productivity 10 social mentions