This is good stuff, reminds me of all horrible cancer I've had to deal with working on certain projects in past. This hopefully isn't an issue with anyone else out there, but there also should be a check for complexity in the views. Dealing with junk like anonymous classes, capture abuse, stateful partials, bloated clashing helpers, rjs, etc. have been worse for my health than 20 years of chain smoking, heavy drinking, and being stabbed.
Minor errata: Rails was released in beta during the fall of 2004. The first Rails conference (Canada on Rails) was in early 2005 and the 1st edition of AWDwR came out in August 2005.
I believe Rails hit v1.0 in December of 2005, but by that point it was already a thriving ecosystem.
You could also upload the Gemfile / Gemfile.lock to a service like versioneye [1] which will then tell you which gems are outdated and what the current versions are.
Great post. I do a lot of these same things whenever I join a new app or am evaluating a project to take on. There's definitely some doozies of Rails apps out there.
I also like to pry open the ApplicationController pretty quickly. You'll usually find all sorts of interesting logic and tight coupling in there.
In the example app you used, the models actually look pretty light on lines of code. I'm willing to bet the Views were full of conditionals, which is another thing I keep an eye out for.
A search tool like ack or grep are also incredibly useful to follow a trail of any interesting scent you might pick up.
>>In the example app you used, the models actually look pretty light on lines of code. I'm willing to bet the Views were full of conditionals, which is another thing I keep an eye out for.
I'm a Rails newbie so please excuse my ignorance... What is the connection between models being light on code and views being full of conditionals? What I assume you mean is that your models should also have view logic so that your templates aren't full of if-then statements. But isn't that what decorators are for?
No, the models shouldn't have view logic such as formatting, that belongs in Presenters. What I was implying is that the views likely have boolean logic/conditionals that are checking various states of the model and then rendering partials/HTML content based on that.
Of course, there could also be model logic in the controllers and helpers as well.
