Understanding GRASP Principles in Ruby on Rails

Enhancing Code Quality and Structure in Web Development

Patrick Karsh
4 min readMay 18, 2024
GRASP that

In software engineering, GRASP (General Responsibility Assignment Software Patterns) principles are a set of guidelines that help developers assign responsibilities to various components within a system. These principles are crucial for creating maintainable, scalable, and robust applications. In the context of Ruby on Rails, a popular web application framework, applying GRASP principles can significantly enhance the quality and structure of your code. This article explores the GRASP principles and their application in Ruby on Rails development.

Information Expert

Principle: Assign responsibility to the class that has the necessary information to fulfill the responsibility.

In Rails: In a Rails application, models are typically the information experts. They contain the business logic and data related to the application’s entities. For example, if you need to calculate the total price of an order, this logic should reside in the Order model because it has access to the line items and their prices.

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Patrick Karsh

NYC-based Ruby on Rails and Javascript Engineer leveraging AI to explore Engineering. https://linktr.ee/patrickkarsh