Chapter 4. Ruby on Rails techniques
This chapter covers
- Using third-party libraries with helpers
- Keeping code DRY using metaprogramming
- Sharing code using plugins and gems
- Benchmarking and profiling Rails applications
“Another Ruby book that teaches Rails?” No, we’re not going that far! This chapter is not an introduction or tutorial on Rails; rather, it is a discussion of techniques related to Ruby on Rails. There’s a middle-documentation problem that’s arisen in the Rails community, and this chapter is meant to fill a few of the gaps that many other books and documentation sources leave open. We’ll cover extending the Rails framework, through library code, plugins, and more, and we’ll finish by talking about profiling your Rails code. Let’s start by looking at Rails’ helper mechanism.
A lot of Rails developers see the magic going on in Rails and wonder how to capture that same simplicity in their own helpers or other Ruby scripts. As we’ve found out, using metaprogramming (remember that from chapter 1?) along with a few of Rails’ built-in mechanisms will give you maximum syntactic sugar while also making it easy to develop.