Hi there,
I am pretty new in Ruby on Rails world. Current, I am working with a
single tier ROR application. Came from J2EE world, just wonder how
Multi-Tier Architecture works in ROR world? Can anyone share your
experience with me?
Thanks
On Wed, Oct 28, 2009 at 5:47 PM, Suki [email protected] wrote:
Hi there,
I am pretty new in Ruby on Rails world. Current, I am working with a
single tier ROR application. Came from J2EE world, just wonder how
Multi-Tier Architecture works in ROR world? Can anyone share your
experience with me?
RoR is an MVC implementation. It is a multi tier framework.
–
Leonardo M…
There’s no place like ~
Right. It’s MVC, rather than three-tiered. It is fairly flexible to
different architectures, as it’s easy to map external RESTful
resources in or out using ActiveResource or other gems. Using
Passenger as your Rails server takes care of serving a lot of your
static content without the overhead of touching your Rails instances
(and depending on how complex your Apache config is, it can be
optimized). Even then, though, I’m not sure that qualifies as what I’m
assuming you mean by ‘multi-tiered.’
I think what Suki means is distributed architecture, as in: database
server, caching server, application server(s) and web farm.
In most enterprise environments you would connect distributed
applications to a middle-tier server using SOA (UDDI/WSDL/SOAP), but the
Ruby/Rails ilk seem to reject the SOAP stack (and WS-*) and favor the
less rigorous REST/XML-RPC/JSON styles. They see the network through
HTTP-protocol colored glasses.
Personally, I wish that the REST/XML option had a (design-by-contract)
approach, i.e, expose interface metadata (like WSDL) that can be
consumed by a client application.
There is a legacy SOAP-RPC stack for Rails 1.x called ActionWebServices
(AWS), but it was dropped by the core Rails 2.x API in favor of
HTTP-REST. AWS does have limited WSDL and XSD support, but it’s not
capable of SOAP-DOC style (the preferred serialization format). I do
like how it is implemented however, you can define data-transfer-objects
using a built-in Struct type, that are used to infer XSD types in the
interface metadata. There are a few forks of the AWS code on GitHub
that have been updated to support Rails 2.3.x.
There’s also WSO2, which uses a native DLL that provides SOAP-DOC with
WS-* extensions. However, it is a pain to install, there is no easy gem
install for it; also the documentation for it is anemic.
On Thu, Oct 29, 2009 at 2:31 AM, Kris Williams
[email protected] wrote:
Personally, I wish that the REST/XML option had a (design-by-contract)
that have been updated to support Rails 2.3.x.There’s also WSO2, which uses a native DLL that provides SOAP-DOC with
WS-* extensions. However, it is a pain to install, there is no easy gem
install for it; also the documentation for it is anemic.
I think that’s because what your’re talking about here is a completly
different architecture that the one Rails is designed for.
If you want to use that architecture, you better not use Rails for
that, use a tool designed for that architecture.
–
Leonardo M…
There’s no place like ~
For SOAP support on Rails see Torquebox project based on JBoss Seam
(Rails(2.3.4)/ScheduledJobs/TaskQueue/SOAP/Telecom supports) all under
JRuby…
Some presentation slides:
Hope this helps…