franco / bookmarks

This is a Rails project for an assessment task.

README

Bookmarks is an assessment task for a developer position. This README contains some remarks and discusses some decisions made in this project.

Implementation notes

• In order to save time I used scaffold to generate code and worked from there. This leads sometimes to code excess. Especially the views don't look very nice. E.g. for the forms I would use SimpleForm.

• UI is kept simplistic.

• I choose bootstrap v4-alpha. Obviously I wouldn’t use alpha software in production, but I was curious to see what is new.

• Tag support: There are many ways to implement tagging and many different Rails gems. As I am not supposed to use unnecessary gems I decided to go simply with a Postgres array. This also makes search fairly easy. A disadvantage is that gathering all tags on large datasets (e.g. for tag cloud, typeahead) is very inefficient. Furthermore I kept the UI simple and I didn’t implement a tag input-tokenizer as this would be out of scope for the time available (there are drop-in solutions which didn’t work together with bootstrap 4 out of the box).

• Search: well, there one could get fancy with elasticsearch but this would be completely out of scope. It simply uses a SQL query.

• To keep the Bookmark and Site model in sync I could have used AR callbacks, AR Observers, or Service Objects. I usually use AR callbacks only to maintain attributes on its own class. Therefore I went with a Service Object. Services facilitates also testing in isolation. Although in this case AR callbacks would have been fine too as Bookmark is strongly dependent on a Site.

• I haven’t used rspec in a while (used minitest lately), therefore the specs might be written not very idiomatic. And I couldn’t get rake test to run the specs instead of the tests. So to run all tests use bin/rspec.