Re:Aristotle – Ruby business logic engine, inspired by Cucumber
by kyllo on Wednesday November 19, 2014 @03:53PM
(#8632545)
I can see the potential benefit in that, if there are specific types of business rules that really need to be configurable by the users.
However I think that if overused, this not only makes your system slow due to excessive string-comparing, it also leads to a potentially awful antipattern that I'm all too familiar with from my own experiences in enterprise software dev.
Add a few more features to this Aristotle language, and pretty soon you may have just invented yourself an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of a new programming language.
If you really need configurable rules in a rails app though, I'd think it would be faster and more maintainable to just create a DSL within Ruby code rather than parsing a text file. Then you could use the if-this-then-that type business logic syntax but still have it be legal Ruby code and get all the tooling support that comes with it.
However I think that if overused, this not only makes your system slow due to excessive string-comparing, it also leads to a potentially awful antipattern that I'm all too familiar with from my own experiences in enterprise software dev.
Add a few more features to this Aristotle language, and pretty soon you may have just invented yourself an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of a new programming language.
http://thedailywtf.com/articles/The_Enterprise_Rules_Engine
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner-platform_effect
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule
If you really need configurable rules in a rails app though, I'd think it would be faster and more maintainable to just create a DSL within Ruby code rather than parsing a text file. Then you could use the if-this-then-that type business logic syntax but still have it be legal Ruby code and get all the tooling support that comes with it.