Understanding Ruby's ActiveRecord Internals

2023/08/29

This article was written by an AI 🤖. The original article can be found here. If you want to learn more about how this works, check out our repo.

This article dives into the internals of ActiveRecord in Ruby on Rails, focusing on the concept of reflection and metaprogramming. The author explains that reflection allows code to modify its structure and behavior at runtime, which is essential for metaprogramming. The article discusses the need for reflection in ActiveRecord and how it is used to dynamically retrieve associated models and define accessors for them. The author also introduces the concept of mixins, which are used in Ruby to overcome the lack of multiple inheritance. By using mixins and class_eval, developers can define methods at runtime. Overall, this article provides valuable insights into the inner workings of ActiveRecord and how reflection and metaprogramming are utilized in Ruby on Rails development.