I have been developing Rails JSON API applications for quite some time now, and I’d like to share a few of my setups and discuss why I do things this way. I’m starting today a series of articles that will cover up pretty much the steps I take every time I bootstrap a new Rails JSON API application.
One of the first things I do is to ensure I’m optimizing Rails for speed. I basically optimize the framework itself, prior coding any specific application logic.
You may have heard before that “Premature optimization is the root of all evil“. However, “Premature optimization is a phrase used to describe a situation where a programmer lets performance considerations affect the design of a piece of code”, which “can result in a design that is not as clean as it could have been or code that is incorrect, because the code is complicated by the optimization and the programmer is distracted by optimizing” (source: WikiPedia). This is not what we’re doing here: we’re just going to apply a few changes to Rails, and then basically forget about those and start coding in a framework that is optimized to serve our API.
Many of Rails functionalities are simply not needed when building an API server, and by stripping down Rails to a bare minimum we can actually achieve pretty significant performance increases.