Ruby on Rails Development
September 30, 2005
I was having a conversation with Eric Molitor (a Dallas programmer who is into Battlebots) today and we were talking about development in Rails. I explained how our IT services company hired a programmer to redevelop the help desk and trouble ticket system in PHP. The process took almost six months and the resulting product worked, but was too heavy (three months later and we have not launched the new system).
I then explained that one of our managers overheard our conversations about Rails and Ajax and decided to read a book on the subject. Eariler this week he took the help desk and trouble ticket specification and wrote a fully functional application in Ruby on Rails with a few touches of Ajax. Imagine a framework that can be learned overnight and allow smart programmers to develop great applications very quickly? Want to guess why everyone is so excited?
So what is so great about Rails? Basically, it is easy to rapidly prototype and launch an application. We were able to see what worked and what did not work. Eric agreed, but explained that Rails has scaling issues. I assume he is correct on this point; however, by the time scaling becomes an issue you likely will have the time and resources to resolve the issue. Why spend time and money creating very scalable applications that may never see the light of day. Get them up and running now…
