OmbuLabs Blog

In this series of code refactoring posts we are discussing how design patterns can be used to make our Ruby code beautiful, maintainable and clean.

Today I want to talk about a pattern that can be very useful when we need to control the flow of a set of events of our objects: The State Pattern a.k.a Finite State Machine.

As a developer it is common to see objects changing their state. At the beginning managing the state of an object can be as simple as having some boolean attributes where you can check if the object is in state A or B. But when the complexity increases you can end up with a number of states that are difficult to manage without breaking the SOLID principles. That is where we can implement the elegant solution provided by the State Pattern.

In our last article of the refactoring series we saw how design patterns can be used to make our Ruby code beautiful and clean. Design patterns are a powerful tool for any developer and a familiarity with them will lead to better code by forcing a consideration of SOLID principles.

Now let’s talk about other pattern that when properly used can be very helpful: The Template Method.

Code refactoring can be defined as “the process of introducing small and incremental changes to leave the code in a better state than it was.”. When refactoring your code you have to consider two things: no new functionality should be added and the external behavior should not be affected.

One of the biggest challenges as a Ruby on Rails Developer is to keep your code clean, simple and easy to maintain and that is why we are always refactoring our code.

There are several techniques that a developer can follow to improve their code by code refactoring, such as extract method, move method, move field, switch statements, etc. If you are not familiarized with them, please visit the Refactoring Guru site.

Another technique developers try to follow is to apply good design patterns to their code. In this post we’ll try to go over some of the documented design patterns and how you can apply them to your Ruby code.