Walking with Ruby… on Rails!!!
The title induces fantacies and I know what you are imagining. Believe me, developing in Ruby is as fantastic as what you were thinking just now. J Jokes apart, if you are in to web development and RoR has not crossed your radar yet, I can aver that you are significantly out-of-date. Fortunately though, if you keep reading this, you will certainly get a glimpse of the revolution in web development that open source communities have brought.
What Ruby and Rails can do for an organization? What can any language-framework pair do for an organization? If there are answers popping up in your mind, be kind enough to consider the same for Ruby on Rails. RoR can do all that in a much easier, faster and cost effective way. On the other hand if you don’t know the answers yet, here is a glimpse of what RoR can do:
· Build customer centric small/medium websites
· Deploy a web product with advanced (web 2.0-ish) features in a very limited time.
· Create automated testing frameworks
· Legacy Application extension, integration and migration
Why only ruby on rails?
Well if you are on the initial stages of paranoia you may like to consider other languages and frameworks, develop a few projects and find out the difference. If you are confident enough to rely on what the open source community has to say, hear this:
· Productivity gains: exponential savings because of smaller teams, more productivity, improved time to market.
· Easy development, easy maintenance : Lesser lines of code (10 times less than Java) , makes development faster and maintenance easier
· Agility: Rails is Agile, no matter how confused you are on your business concept, rails will help you visualize. It adapts to your changing requirements quickly and easily.
· Free: Its free and open source, can’t talk more on cost effectiveness.
· Powerful: Its can be simply put as what you SEEK is what you get.
For a more technical soul here is how ruby on rails score over others
· Support for Representational State Transfer (REST) architecture
· SOA-like integration with enterprise systems
· Convention over configuration framework simplifies data management
· Don’t Repeat Yourself or DRY model based on Ruby’s inherent ability to provide Domain specific languages
· MVC (model view controller) design pattern
· Built in testing at every level
· Capistrano / ActiveRecord migration
· Ajax support in any framework; runs on any Unix open source platform
What RoR has done already? Testimonials: Some live projects singing the success story for ruby on rails.
Ø Amazon.com: Yes! The same Amazon.com
Ø Basecamp: project management tool by 37 signals
Ø Bixee: An upcoming Indian job portal
Ø BharathRentals: India ’s car rental service
Ø Dimewise: personal finance management
Ø HBO Asia : HBO’s Asian broadcast online
Ø Scribd : online document sharing and publishing
Ø Shopify: e-commerce
Ø simplifyMD: digital chart room for small hospitals
Ø Twitter: Online community, social networking and microblogging
Ø Google: With Gears on rails google has brought online documents mangement offline
