What does it take to develop an enterprise application with Rails? Enterprise Rails introduces several time-tested software engineering principles to prepare you for the challenge of building a high-performance, scalable website with global reach. You'll learn how to design a solid architecture that ties the many parts of an enterprise website together, including the database, your servers and clients, and other services as well.

Many Rails developers think that planning for scale is unnecessary. But there's nothing worse than an application that fails because it can't handle sudden success. Throughout this book, you'll work on an example enterprise project to learn first-hand what's involved in architecting serious web applications.

With this book, you will:

Building for scale requires more work up front, but you'll have a flexible website that can be extended easily when your needs change. Enterprise Rails teaches you how to architect scalable Rails applications from the ground up. "Enterprise Rails is indispensable for anyone planning to build enterprise web services. It's one thing to get your service off the ground with a framework like Rails, but quite another to construct a system that will hold up at enterprise scale. The secret is to make good architectural choices from the beginning. Chak shows you how to make those choices. Ignore his advice at your peril." — Hal Abelson, Prof. of Computer Science and Engineering, MIT