flipper VS Scenic

That’s it! You now have a fully configured feature flagging system in your Rails app. Notice we didn’t cover some more advanced features that Flipper offers, including enabling features for a user group or individual users. For that, check out Flipper on Github. We also didn’t cover feature flagging frontend features in this post - if that becomes a requirement we could easily create an endpoint that uses the FeaturesRepo  and sends enabled features to the frontend to toggle. If you learned something new consider following me here - I’ll be putting out more content on Ruby on Rails and software development as I work on Firecode.io. Preparing for a coding interview? Check out Firecode.io.

I think you are calling it Runtime Controls: https://github.com/jnunemaker/flipper/issues/162

Flipper is a gem that makes feature flags and different ways to toggle them available in Rails. It is highly modular. Apart from the main gem, you'll also have to pick a storage adapter — but more on that later. Let's use the ActiveRecord adapter for now.

Since Honeybadger is a Ruby shop, we use the flipper gem.

The next step came about when I learned more about our use of Flipper; a Ruby gem for dynamically toggling on and off features. I didn’t know when the feature would roll out, but I wanted control over the feature. I also wanted admins of other Forems to have control as well. This was trivial with Flipper. Once I deployed the code, Forem’s got the original behavior unless they turned “flipped” on the feature.

flipper with Flipper UI to enable flag management

What advantages does your gem have over Flipper?

To model our Deliverable class, we will need a view. We will use the popular scenic gem, which provides some useful generators for creating views with their respective migrations, and utilities to handle views versioning.

+1 for scenic - https://github.com/scenic-views/scenic

If the data doesn't need to be close to real-time, and if your DB can handle a bit of load, I'd use a "batch" approach. To do this, I'd create a materialized view in your relational DB that you'd then refresh periodically. The easiest way to do this is with the `scenic` gem. Once you've done this, you can simply create a new model and set the `table_name` to the name of the materialized view, and then treat it as a regular model.

I use the scenic gem to manage views which uses raw sql files: https://github.com/scenic-views/scenic

add scenic

TIL about fx gem for storing triggers in schema.rb. That makes me so happy because scenic gem for creating database views is one of my favorites. Postgres is very powerful and it's great to see tools for exposing that through Rails.