Rails™ AntiPatterns: Best Practice Ruby on Rails™ Refactoring

Chapter 10. Building for Failure

While most of us aren’t building websites for banks, medical centers, or the NCSA, it’s still important to focus on and be aware of the possible failure points of our applications. Doing so gives our products an attention to detail that will be appreciated by our user base and will evolve into real, tangible profits.

Building an application to handle various failure modes is simply another aspect of mindful, detail-oriented application design. Building for failure does not necessarily mean that the application must recover gracefully from all possible failures; rather, it means it should degrade gracefully in the face of uncertainty. A classic example of this is the “over capacity” error page sometimes presented ...