barinek@pivotal boulder - Unbuilt Rails Dependencies: How to design for loosely-coupled, highly-cohesive components within a Rails application

Some thoughts on maintaining large Rails codebases from our #pivotalboulder Director @barinek:

I'm sure a few of you have encountered this scenario... You're a year in and your Rails application is growing in size as well as complexity. It's becoming increasingly difficult to navigate through a sea of models, not to mention that your test suite is grinding to a screeching halt. You have a handful of 3rd-party services you integrate with so you start thinking about extracting Gems. Although you're nervous, as you'll now need to manage and version multiple Gems. You're looking at a mountain of work with little feature development. Here's a solution that has worked on several projects that might help to avoid this scenario: move loosely-coupled, highly-cohesive components to unbuilt gems within your lib directory while maintaining a single Git repository. Sounds strange? Here are a few important facts that might help clarify the solution... There's only one Git reposit...

Full article: http://pivotallabs.com/users/mbarinek/blog/articles/2022