A Conversation with Badri Janakiraman about Hexagonal Rails

The recent conversation I’ve been having with Kent Beck, David Heinemeier Hansson about whether TDD is dead has spawned plenty of other conversations. One such exchange was with my colleague, Badri Janakiraman, one of our senior developers at Thoughtworks. Badri has over a decade of experience, working both in Ruby on Rails, but also in other development stacks with Java and .NET. For the last six years he’s been working in Studios, our product division, where much of his time has been with Mingle, our project collaboration tool that is a long running Rails project.

Since our discussions were so interesting, I thought it would be fun to capture them on video. So we scheduled some time together for a video chat, which I think you’ll find an interesting viewpoint into the role of Hexagonal Architecture in Ruby on Rails, and an useful complement to the “Is TDD Dead” discussion.

1: Active Record or Data Mapper?

5 June 2014

We introduce the notion of Hexagonal Architecture, and Badri describes the trade-offs between using Active Record or a Data Mapper to push the database outside the hexagon.

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2: Rails: Platform or Suite of Components?

12 June 2014

When working with a rich framework like Ruby on Rails you can treat it as with a platform or as a suite of components. Badri discusses the difference between these and we discuss what trade-offs go with the decison.

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