What is Rack and how can we use it?
Being on the beautiful journey that is Software Development, and
working as a Rails Developer, I often get curious about the different building blocks of this beautiful framework. Whenever I get time I like to go deep on one of these subjects, read about it and try to understand them, how to use them, and leverage that knowledge into producing better apps.
One of those important parts of Ruby on Rails certainly is Rack, and it is worth our time to go through. Learning about Rack, I have found more than a few excellent usages to better my skills and make my life easier.
What is Middleware?
This term gets used a lot, so much so that it is difficult to define it precisely but rather give it a few different definitions across the industry. We will try to focus on web development and usage of middleware mainly in Rails applications.
Middleware is a (loosely defined) term for any software or service that enables the parts of a system to communicate and manage data. It is the software that handles communication between components and input/output, so developers can focus on the specific purpose of their application.
In server-side web application frameworks like Ruby on Rails, this term is often used to refer to pre-build components or libraries like Rack middleware that can be added to the framework’s request/response processing pipeline in which data flows through a sequence of tasks or stages. Very common examples are logging, authentication, and the other, these tend to be the helpers that everyone needs across multiple applications, they basically intercept a request, do something with it and pass it on.
What is Rack?
Rack provides a minimal, modular, and adaptable interface for developing web applications in Ruby. By wrapping HTTP requests and responses in the simplest way possible, it unifies and distills the API for web servers, web frameworks, and software in between (the so-called middleware) into a single method call.
The characteristics of a Rack application is that the application object responds to the call method. The call method takes in the environment object as an argument and returns the Rack response object.
In its core, it is important to understand that Rack is not just a request/response filter it does so much more, Rack is a web server interface convention, a modular interface between web servers and web applications developed in the Ruby programming language.
#ruby #software-development #ruby-on-rails #tips-and-tricks
