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Where Does Ruby Fit in the Enterprise? Bruce Tate talks the business of Ruby


By Alex Handy
October 1, 2006 — 
When Ruby first burst onto the scene in 1993, no one paid much attention. How could they? The World Wide Web was the hot new technology back then, and new programming languages are rarely ready for prime time when first released.

But now, 13 years later, the language has found much love on the Web, due to the release of Ruby on Rails, a Web application framework that puts the power of Ruby in the hands of Web developers. Thanks to the language’s relative simplicity and the framework’s strict adherence to the model-view-controller architecture, Ruby on Rails has gathered a reputation for being a fast and easy on-ramp to creating Web 2.0 applications.

This fall, O’Reilly released “Ruby on Rails: Up and Running,” by Bruce Tate and Curt Hibbs. We caught up with Tate in September and had a chat with him about where Ruby on Rails fits in the enterprise.

SD Times: Where should Ruby on Rails be used in an enterprise? What holes does it fill?

Bruce Tate: Right now, Ruby on Rails works best for green-field, database-backed Web applications with moderate scalability requirements. This is a significant share of applications that are used for Java today. People are starting to push Rails into other areas as well, such as those requiring more scalability, or applications without database backing, but both of those areas are experimental.

What advantages does Ruby on Rails have over other Web development frameworks? If an organization already has a system in place for Web development, is there actually any time savings by throwing that all out and starting over with Ruby on Rails?

Ruby on Rails is simply more productive, but that almost never means rewriting an application for the sake of a rewrite. It’s important to deliver tangible business value with each step, so you should only rewrite existing applications if the current one can no longer satisfy business requirements, and Ruby on Rails can.

How has Ruby on Rails changed over the past year?

Ruby on Rails is moving from an edge product to the mainstream as we speak. There are more Rails books, Rails developers and Rails projects that can be used to draw experience. Web services (especially ReST-style Web services), AJAX support and the database mapping layers called Active Record are all buzzwords popular in the Rails community, and they each have had major innovations. ReST is a simpler model for Web services; AJAX uses XML and JavaScript to deliver richer Internet user interfaces, and Active Record represents a more direct approach for dealing with the database.

What sort of supporting tools are out there for collaborative Ruby coding?

The tools that support Rails are not your typical integrated development environments. Instead, you see excellent support for features like these: Interpreting commands while a Rails application is executing. For example, I can set a breakpoint, and print out all of the values for the variables in my application, and even change them, and then resume execution. That’s not a traditional debugger, but in some ways, it’s more powerful.

Automated testing support goes beyond most other language testing tools. Ruby builds much of the testing infrastructure for you by default.

Are there any agile-specific Ruby tools?

Collaboa is a great tool for managing requirements on a Ruby project. Selenium is a great testing tool that works with Web apps, even those with AJAX, including Rails. And there’s a great editor with outstanding integration called TextMate. JetBrains is working on a Ruby IDE, and RadRails is a pretty good Ruby on Rails environment based on Eclipse.


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