Working With Rails

It’s never right to only have one solution applied to every problem. However, Rails is quite good at Web sites; for that task alone, I stick with Rails.
Rails, of course, isn’t a language, it’s a framework. Sometimes you need to type non-Ruby, for example XHTML, CSS, SQL, JavaScript, crontab.
Sometimes it even makes sense to write non-Web stuff (e.g. daemons) in C or shell.

For most of the website development I have been doing for the past one and a half years, I have used Ruby and Ruby on Rails almost exclusively. RoR was used exclusively for “greenfield” web development, but there were times I had to use a PHP or Java EE solution and modified it for a client.
I enjoy knowing several languages, even if I don’t always find a use for each and every one. But now that JRuby is more stable and complete, it may be possible to create Rails sites that use several languages together, such as Ruby, Java, Scala, Jython, etc. I will actually be researching this specifically in an internal project I am starting next week.

obviously this is depending on the project requirement. the fact is me and my team is fully working with rails for last 3 months.
we are also using java+lucence based indexing service for our rails project. hopefully we will move our deployment to jruby based deployment package.

i believe, we should determine the right tool for solving right requirement. we don’t need to be biased :)

I don’t think rails is appropriate for everything, but if you are doing a new website or completely redoing an old one then I think it is fantastic. Where I work we have a real mix of stuff. ASP, ASP.NET (VB.NET) V1.1 , ASP.NET (C#)V1.1 , ASP.NET 2.0 and now a Ruby on Rails app. I would love for all our stuff to be in Rails so I dont have to keep 5 cheatsheets with language syntax hanging up by my desk, and Rails is just easier to be productive with. The biggest challenge is the time and/or cost to move everything over, I am in a non profit company and I am the ONLY developer.

I am hoping we can slowly migrate more stuff to rails. If I want to create a desktop tool to be used in windows I will use C# but if I need a webapp it will be rails. The nice thing is these days it is not a total disaster to have apps in different languages , they can still work with each other (but it would be nice to have one language to deal with.)

I have single sign on between a .NET app, rails app and an externally hosted flash app so although I would prefer to use rails for all our web apps I don’t feel the different language apps we have keep me from using rails and integrating it into our systems. (BUT RAILS STILL RULES!!!)

RoR is awesome for website development. I never entered in touch with a better tool than this. I have a little question are there any kind of ruby that is good substitute for MySql and C++ ?

I plan on using RoR as much as possible. Will use PHP and just plain static sites for the rest. Looking into how to use Rails as a generator back-end to create static sites.

Rails framework is very developer friendly!
If you guys remember php was first called as personal home page, the reason was easy to pick up and easy to host!
Now the Ruby language and Rails framework is taking away the charm… this time even developers are interested with Rails!
However, I sincerely feel don’t carry away by the technology… please concentrate on the problem/application we are with and then choose the best technology available. This would help un-necessary comments, regrets… at the later stages!

Rails is in the process of becoming cutting-edge technology!

cheers!
Sumanth Krishna

Well, I would LOVE to work solely in Rails, but unfortunately I still maintain a Coldfusion website and two intranet sites in ASP/ASP.NET and PHP. I also use quite a bit of CSS (my designer doesn’t know it so i translate her designs in CSS/XHTML) and some javascript. The joy is that I’m redoing an entire site in Rails so I get to spend a lot of time doing that each day.

I’d like to add that everyone working in Rails should do their best to have/maintain/acquire a solid understanding of raw SQL. There are so many performance and code saving techniques that you can benefit from if you have a solid knowledge of SQL. Just my humble opinion.

It depends upon the specification and the nature of use of the platform. Scooping will be the best way to start things. But if your looking for a quick-stable way to do a web project. Rails will be the language to do. Minor adjustment for developers from JSP/PHP/.

I have given up C#, PHP, and Java like a bad drug. I still play with haskell, python and lisp occasionally, but Ruby is what makes me happy, and for web stuff I only use Rails.

Well, I would love to concentrate my work on ruby and especially ruby on rails, but there are some projects which are implemented in Asp.NET. So I am stuck for now.
Moreover, I think every web developer still has to maintain certain PHP skills in order to get some projects done. There are so many php open source projects out there, it would be a waste of time and resources to start them from scratch. So we still need the skills to maintain and hack them for our purposes. Still, the share of ruby projects is constantly increasing.

RoR is certainly picking up steam, but it’s far from critical mass. Even though development is easy, there is still relatively little community consensus about what is the “right” way to deploy and scale. Companies like Engine Yard and Joyent are slowly solving these operations issues, but there is a long way to go.

Eric Knoller
RoR Power
http://www.rorpower.com

Ruby is fantastic, and Rails is a framework worthy of the language, but limiting yourself to a single language or platform is asking for trouble. I like to keep my hands dirty by playing in other niche languages (currently working on Erlang and D). You can pick up surprising insights by shopping around with an open mind.

I use Rails almost exclusively. For the stuff I do, it’s almost always the right choice. If the project is really small, I sometimes use PHP (plain old PHP, no framework).

Rails is a web framework not a language. :)

For the web, Ruby, for scripts, Ruby. I don’t write desktop apps anymore as I don’t have to deal with windows anymore, but native C/C++ is always the most stable and speedy language choice for desktop apps. Maybe C# if it was Windows only.

These days I use Rails exclusively. That’s because my work is entirely with greenfields website development – for which Rails is well-suited. In the past I have had considerable experience with C – and if I were to write desktop (or terminal) apps, that is my choice.

I’d certainly agree with other programmers here who note that keeping your fingers in other pies is a wise choice. Don’t want to anchor yourself too tightly to a single technology – for yea, even Rails will become a dinosaur someday. Happens to the best of them… but for the moment – it is still fresh and full of potential, and I will continue to enjoy it while it stands full in the sunshine.

By the way, is there any other framework developed in Ruby (is that possible?) other than Rails? ..or maybe Ruby written in other framework? Just wondering..

Hi Zalan

Checkout this
http://rbazinet.wordpress.com/2008/01/14/10-alternative-ruby-web-frameworks/

nice, didn’t even realize there were so many. I do agree with the statement that sticking to one language only is not a very good thing. I guess doing two different languages/frameworks, like ASP.Net and PHP might work out really well. Cashwise, too. What’s most annoying in ASP.Net is that it’s not open source – though the source is downloadable now, but I found a fancy framework like an hour ago, called spring.net. heard of it?

As a student, developer and a “hacker” – I have to work with many languages and frameworks. Java, PHP, C++, TCL, Perl … and Offcourse Ruby. Good to see there are certain php frameworks that now copy rails which makes life some what easier for me when I jump across languages. When doing my Java projects at university I always stick with MCV design pattern to solve all my problems. But sadly some languages/frameworks still have to catchup with rails awsome framework structure.

So.. untill then! rails it is.

Like many here, I have also used a wide range of languages in the past, and it is true that working with Rails means you should know several languages right off the bat, such as HTML/XHTML, CSS, maybe some javascript or a dash of AJAX goodness (although Rails does a good job of taking that out of your hands). Like many as well, I almost solely work within the Rails framework, even for simple static sites knowing they’re never going to be simple static sites, I will throw together a quick little CMS system for them to use. Rails is certainly overkill for somethings, and I’m tempted to explore some of the other frameworks that use Ruby to deal with such jobs, however, I also fine that focusing on just one framework helps me excel in that one, and well, to be honest, it lets me cater exclusively to the RoR business world, which there seems to be plenty of.

Anyone who uses Ruby or the Rails Framework exclusively is a technology specialist, rather than a software engineer. Whether it’s good or bad is a pure judgment call – I’d say it’s bad because such people box themselves into using a single design pattern and programming style. RoR is good enough for constructing most websites, and I’d leave it at that.

In the fast paced technology field we developers thrive in, Languages and Platforms will come and go. Ruby on Rails is no exception to the rule, and will yield to new, exciting platforms in another 5 years or so. It’s the nature of this business, and if you aren’t prepared to explore the alternatives, you’ll be as outdated as a COBOL or Fortran programmer sooner than you think. For example, Merb is looking attractive since it scales better in true-threaded Ruby implementations like JRuby; and Django is looking attractive because it’s available out-of-box in Google Apps.

Ruby on Rails is not always an appropriate choice over other available technologies. If you don’t spend the time with the alternatives to fully understand their capabilities and limitations, though, you’ll never know how to make the best design decisions.

As they say: Give a kid a hammer, and everything suddenly looks like a nail.

Well, we do use lots of other languages too (C#, Java, C++, sometimes even Haskell, among others..) but what is interesting
that we did use Rails once for a non-web project. It was chosen because of Ruby itself (rapid development) and very nice ORM mappings
making all database stuff easy (ActiveRecord).

Yes, Ruby (more precisely) is not suitable for all tasks, and language should be chosen according to the task. But it’s very general-purpose, and if I have understood correctly, C# is asymptotically approaching the state of static-typed Rubiness :)

Just to add to the optional other languages, for some out there, this really might be the newest and greatest option! www.coboloncogs.org/