Make Your Application Stand on its Own
I’ve come across a number of web applications recently that cross-link between other applications to steal their functionality.
This sucks!
It leads to poor application design as sooner or later developers come along and are naturally confused about what should go where. They then increase the amount of cross-stitching between the applications. Eventually you end up with one large application that’s not so great at doing two things. You have to get both applications working independently when you just want to use one. It wastes time and it creates a mess. The more applications you connect this way, the worse it becomes. It lowers the quality of both applications and kills code velocity.
Stop the madness!
For those of us that are Rails developers there is a pre-determined place to put outside dependent functionality - the ‘vendor’ path. If you put all of your external dependencies there you have a nice self-contained application that can stand on its own. Functionality shared between applications can be broken out into mutual dependencies and be pulled into the respective applications as plugins, frameworks, or gems that are stored in the vendor path.
If you have a framework, put it into “vendor/framework.” This is where rails goes for instance (vendor/rails).
If you have a plugin, put it into “vendor/plugins.” It’s the standard plugin location for Rails.
If you have a gem, install gemsonrails and put it into “vendor/gems.”
Now everything is nice and tidy. All you have to do to get your application ready for development or deployment is to check it out. No gem installations or framework installations. The dependencies are already met as soon as you get the code.