Rebuilding Rails

Today I went through the first chapter of Rebuilding Rails where I learned how to create, build, install, and use my own gem. I also built my first application on top of Rack.

Today I also finished Chapter 4 of Rails Tutorial.

Here is another resource I found yesterday about how to create your own framework(in PHP).

As one of the bullet points under “Why would you like to create your own framework?” it says:

To refactor an old/existing application that needs a good dose of recent web development best practices;

So, I’m hoping to use this guide and any other resources I can find as inspiration on how I can refactor the old code base I’m in charge of at work. Our legacy code base definitely needs help, but currently with the amount of new custom features our clients are paying for I can’t justify letting the current code base sit for months while I work on a rewrite in Rails. I’m pretty confident that refactoring the application to use the MVC architecture and to have Unit tests is the proper path to take so that we can properly maintain it and add to it while we work on a rewrite on the side. Basically I’m “just” going to build in my own framework inside the existing code base. Easy right?