Rails™ AntiPatterns: Best Practice Ruby on Rails™ Refactoring

Foreword

It’s hard to believe that it will soon be three years since Zed Shaw published his infamous (and now retracted) rant “Rails Is a Ghetto.” Even though Zed’s over-the-top depiction of certain well-known people was wicked and pure social satire, the expression he coined has stuck like the proverbial thorn among certain higher echelons of the community. It’s an especially piquant expression to use when we’re called on to fix atrocious Rails projects. Occasionally, we’ll even use the phrase with regard to our own messes. But most commonly, this expression is applied to code written by the unwashed masses. The rapid ascension of Rails as a mainstream technology has attracted droves of eager programmers from both outside and inside the wide ...