Fast JSON API VS Ruby on Rails

NASA uses Ruby on Rails ... Netflix originally had one of the best JSON API serializers (before changing maintainers).

There is a to_json method and recent benchmarks I found are placing a few ms above fast_jsonapi (which is no longer maintained) and slightly faster that jsonapi-serializer (which is supposed to replace fast_jsonapi according to their website).

Netflix has definitively had some Ruby in the past as they have the (now unmaintained) https://github.com/Netflix/fast_jsonapi All their ruby repos seem to be abandoned though, so assume there's not much going on there with Ruby currently.

Last week, I covered tricks and tips with handling forms and updating state, as well as sending the data through fetch requests to the backend. Since then, I have been working endlessly on fetching data from the backend, which included building relationships between my various models and sending the data through a Json Serializer made by Netflix, Fast_JSONAPI Serializer (now just JSONAPI Serializer). I learned some new things while working with the serializer and felt I could impart my wisdom this week.

After googling and reading some articles, I found that there are a lot of blogs related to Fast JSON API which is now deprecated and kind of replaced by JSON:API Serializer. These gems are following JSON:API specification and force our API response to meet this specification standard.

[0] is a my favorite demonstration of it.

[0]: https://github.com/rails/rails/commit/b83965785db1eec019edf1...

Here's a real life example: Imagine a Ruby on Rails app on which a team of developers are working. The code is hosted on GitLab and all the work is coordinated using GitLab issues. In other words: For every commit, there's an associated issue and the issue number acts as a sort of primary key for documentation, time reporting and so forth. This convention has a few advantages, most notably the ability to easily learn more about how, when and by whom features were implemented as well as how this implementation came to be.

Ruby on Rails is regarded as one of the best ruby frameworks. It was the primary language in developing big projects such as Twitter and helped the language boost the community. Often referred to as “Rails,” Ruby on Rails is a web development framework with an MVC control structure and currently running its 6.1 version. The 16-year-old language has dramatically influenced the web development structures and managing databases, web pages, and other components on a web application.

In Rails 7.1, a new option _instance_methods is introduced, allowing developers to opt-out of the automatic generation of instance methods for enums. When enum is defined with _instance_methods: false, Rails will no longer generate methods like pending?, processed?, etc.

Rails isn't super opinionated about database writes, its mostly left up to developers to discover that for relational DBs you do not want to be doing a bunch of small writes all at once.

That said it specifically has tools to address this that started appearing a few years ago https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/35077

The way my team handles it is to stick Kafka in between whats generating the records (for us, a bunch of web scraping workers) and and a consumer that pulls off the Kafka queue and runs an insert when its internal buffer reaches around 50k rows.

Rails is also looking to add some more direct background type work with https://github.com/basecamp/solid_queue but this is still very new - most larger Rails shops are going to be running a second system and a gem called Sidekiq that pulls jobs out of Redis.

I'm looking forward to see what extractions from this will land on rails. For example: https://github.com/rails/rails/issues/50454

Here is what strict_loading does (source):

Kamal is a wonderfully simple way to deploy your applications anywhere. It will also be included by default in Rails 8. Kamal is trivial, but I don’t recommend using it on your development machine.

Here's the GitHub milestone I've based this article on — https://github.com/rails/rails/milestone/87