The never-ending desire for riveting Web sites that “pull eyeballs”, lengthen stay and induce return visits has, since 2004, complicated the life of Web application engineers. Enriching a page with Flash, embedded video, visitor talkback, and self-serve communication channels means developer teams need varied expertise in Ajax, Web services and allied technological tools. Happily, Yukihiro Matsumoto authored the Ruby on Rails language and offered it up as a Web 2.0 framework option with the simple immediacy of PHP and the familiar architecture, clean code and robust quality of Java.

At a briefing I attended earlier this week, a Project Manager at HyTech Professionals out in Nashua (www[.]hytechpro[.]com) raved about the agile development they have managed for hundreds of clients with Ruby on Rails. At the core, he claimed, all a developer really need attend to is a Web server, a database engine and such sparse code it’s unbelievable. This independent software house found it could slash time to market with the speed and ease with which RoR could generate rich, database-driven Web 2.0 projects.

Still, hands-on experience with a solid client base demonstrated two things to bear in mind:

 Ruby on Rails is not the silver bullet that sweeps away the complexity of J2EE. Matsumoto never did claim RoR was a comprehensive enterprise IDE. Rather, the platform seems to have worked very well as a leaner replacement for combos like Tomcat and JDBC.

 Developers have still endured manual processes and practices. Needless to say, this has meant an active search for a killer app IDE to overlay on RoR. Let me tell you what I turned up in my next post.



By: Hytech Professionals

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In the last four years, we have seen how Ruby on Rails (RoR) built on, and accelerated the wider acceptance of, the object-oriented Ruby language. Consequently, the Ruby/RoR combo has become a workhorse of such independent software providers as Nashua (NH)-based HyTech Professionals (www.hytechpro.com). Though busy as the proverbial bee, the development teams there gave me a peek at apps they use to produce more than a hundred web-facing projects year after year.

As early as 2005, Ruby on Rails validated the language by making available an open-source framework for executing database-driven web applications. Its sparse architecture requirement, very lean code and easy access to support for PHP or Ajax, for example, made prototyping easy and quick.

Since then, the HyTech Professionals developers have nabbed one “killer app” after another to broaden the utility of Ruby on Rails. One of the first was the ActiveState Komodo integrated development environment that, beginning with version 3.5, provided edit, debug and testing support for the elegance of Ruby and Ruby on Rails code.

Another very useful app is “ModelSecurity”, a generator that reminds Ruby on Rails developers to write access control for the data model of a Web site. This makes for security defense in depth since architect developers very often program security only into controllers and views.

Fast-forward to last year and we find that FiveRuns quietly acknowledged the enterprise inroads Ruby on Rails has made by writing monitoring functions for RoR in its enterprise management and monitoring suite. All this means is that developers gain diagnostic visibility into the behavior of production-time versions.

All in all, developers continue to value the fact that Ruby on Rails gets a project up and going fast and has capabilities aplenty for building fairly complex Web sites.



By: Hytech Professionals

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