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Ruby’s been Workin’ on the Rails


By Alex Handy
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January 15, 2006 —  (Page 1 of 2)
Ruby on Rails, the Web application framework that reached version 1.0 in mid-December, has gathered a full head of open-source steam over the past year, and numerous luminaries of the Java community, such as Bruce Tate and David Geary, have headed to Ruby, thanks to a development environment that’s been called both quick and easy.

“I think Ruby on Rails has a lot of promise,” said open-source analyst and Navica CEO Bernard Golden. “They give you a lot of the infrastructure: My term would be they give you a lot of the plumbing. Rather than creating all the connections, it just delivers all that. It gives you a huge leg-up in building your prototypical database-driven Web site.”

Richard Monson-Haefel, a senior analyst at the Burton Group, has just completed a 30-page report on Ruby on Rails. He said Ruby is an excellent evolving technology that should be considered by organizations searching for new Web frameworks.

“It offers a very strict Model-View-Controller model,” he said. “But it gives you the ease of development a lot of people associate with PHP. It’s much easier to maintain than a complex PHP script or a simple J2EE program. J2EE is notoriously complex, and PHP can be tough to maintain because it doesn’t have a good MVC. It’s very good for developing Web applications very quickly.”

Monson-Haefel pointed out some of Ruby on Rails’ shortcomings, which are primarily database-related. “1.0 of Ruby on Rails did not support compound primary keys [common in relational databases] and has no support for legacy databases.”

He said the framework also lacks support for two-phased commit. “If you’re making changes to two databases and you want them both to roll back at the same time, it doesn’t support that. Only 10 to 15 percent of Web applications need that.”

One Web site that has moved to Ruby on Rails is the popular comic site Penny Arcade . Webmaster and system administrator Erik Karulf said that when new comics come out three times a week, Penny Arcade can receive an average of 700 unique hits a second. Prior to the Ruby on Rails transition in November, Penny Arcade was a PHP/MySQL-based site.




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