# Modular applications

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/modular-applications/149391>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [September 24, 2008, 12:08pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/modular-applications/149391 "2008-09-24T12:08:52Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![fatu](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/f/e36b37/32.png) [@fatu](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/fatu)\
**Post date:** [September 24, 2008, 12:08pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/modular-applications/149391/1 "2008-09-24T12:08:52Z")

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Hello everybody,

I’ve just started studying Rails and I love it already for its simple,  
pragmatic spirit and the effectiveness and productivity that its  
approach brings.  
I’m thinking about building new applications on top of it and about  
rebuilding existing J2EE applications in Rails as well, but I’ve come  
across an architectural problem: we need to structure applications  
into functional modules, each comprising any artifacts needed for the  
additional functionality to work and interact flowlessly with the rest  
of the application. The modules need to have clean interfaces and  
dependencies between them, so that we can build and distribute  
different “variants” of the application (e.g. basic edition,  
management edition etc.).  
How would you proceed and/or what (existing or additional) tools would  
you use in order to do so? I’m really interested about both  
application structuring and build and deployment processes and tools  
advice. I’m interested in the development process as well, because it  
would be highly desirable for developers not to keep the whole  
application in their development workspace, but only the modules on  
which they actually work (and their dependencies of course).

Is the Rails Engines plugin the way to go? Would it satisfy all  
requirements?

Thanks in advance.

Fabio