Ruby on Rails is a highly productive framework for building Interactive web applications with a database back-end.
Ruby the language has been around for a while. It's a pure OO dynamic language that inherits many ideas from Smalltalk and Python. Then came along the "killer app" Rails, which was extracted from real-life projects at 37signals (Basecamp).
Rails follows the design principles of MVC, Don't Repeat Yourself (DRY) and "least surprise" to use (end generate) default expected behavior as much as possible. Evangelists claim a 10-fold productivity gain. When your application doesn't require a big, fat J2EE stack, then Ruby on Rails may be the answer.
Alternative to J2EE/.NET
What does Fenway Group recommend?
We recommend that you start utilizing this technology for developing typical CRUD applications (Create Read Update Delete), in cases where it can deliver more cost-efficient solutions than more complex frameworks such as J2EE and .NET.
How can Fenway Group help you?
We can assess your project to check if Ruby on Rails would be a good fit. We can also offer consulting on all aspects of Ruby and Rails projects: architecture, integration, performance, testing and UI issues.
Many leading industry experts believe that Ruby on Rails could replace J2EE/.NET for many (but not all) web applications. However, Ruby and Rails are at much earlier stages of maturity than Java, so don't expect APIs to be available for everything you want to do. When there is a good fit between your project requirements and Rails, then there is an opportunity to develop much faster, with less effort and fewer lines of code.
Six things you should know
- Ruby of Rails makes frequent use of defaults. If you can follow the defaults you can save significant time and effort.
- It's a framework not a process. You still need the processes that you would normally use on your projects.
- Scaffolding is auto-generated views for CRUD operations. Very useful for rapid prototyping, but expect to replace it with a real scaffold.
- Ajax is very easy with Ruby on Rails. Much of the necessary Javascript code is generated for you.
- Don't be fooled. Although it is easy to use Rails without knowing much Ruby, knowledge of Ruby is actually quite important.
- Easy to develop, not always easy to deploy. Setting up a Ruby on Rails production environment is quite different from J2EE.
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