the ‘bee log

http://www.beust.com/weblog/archives/000382.html

I tend to agree with the article above: Ruby is incredibly elegant and interesting and Rails is a quite nice framework for making web applications, but I don’t see this taking off in the mainstream development shop.

Where Rails could gain traction and be a great choice is in the small, product-focused team… the kind of team Paul Graham talks about (startup, great hackers, etc.). Ruby has a lot to offer in terms of keeping smart people intellectually challenged and happy with their toolbox. The kind of team/product I’m talking about is perhaps best illustrated by 37signals and their backpack (etc.) product.

As far as an enterprise solution, I don’t really see it. You’re faced with the fact that you may need to scale up and maintain applications forever and ever (I read something somewhere by someone saying “Java is the new Cobol”, maybe the Gilmor Gang, not sure). Sad but true…

A thing I’ve found that’s really nice with Rails is that architecture and style are baked into the environment. The way you name classes, files, database tables, etc. must be consistent (you can change it with a re-config). Programming within constraints is an extremely powerful paradigm… especially when they’re native to the tool (e.g. no individual developer buy-in required). I find that when I’ve got my architect/designer hat on I’m more-or-less trying to introduce the right constraints for development… with Rails they’re already there. This philosophy - I’d think - would let you get to the agile principle of “simple design” much, much quicker.

Also nice is the use of MVC and object-relational-mapping. These patterns/tools remove a lot of difficult decisions from an already tough job. Instead of having to evaluate a host of solutions from different vendors, it’s already in the box.

Anyway, initial impressions… I’ve only been playing with this on off hours for a couple of weeks. I’m sure I’ll have more to say later…