Davai Blog

I just wrapped up a small web development project using Ruby on Rails. I never ventured into RoR before, so this was all new to me, and I have to say that I really enjoyed the rail ride. With a first impression in hand, here is what I saw as positives and negatives of this technology.

Awesome

Lesser development time: I would say we saved 30% of man hours I would expect to invest in such a project, which always makes me happy.

Easy maintainability: I usually dive into a project with a set of guidelines instead of a cemented plan, so the fact that modifications trickled through the whole application with ease was great for iterations.

Great framework: For a manager, this is gold. You can throw new people into the mix without fear of disrupting cohesiveness, and the setup for code reuse is brilliant. I could easily monitor the progress, which I did endlessly since this is all new to me.

Other aspects of RoR I enjoyed were the available testing tools, the wonderful support for AJAX, the ease with which you can separate business and presentation logic, and the fact that it’s open source.

Not as awesome

Development cost: While development time shrunk, the cost didn’t. First, I had difficulty finding programmers. Since a lot of our development is done overseas, the hunt for talent was tedious, and wages were higher.

Hosting: Setting up the server was annoying at times, but this might be because of inexperience.

Lack of information: Unlike PHP or Java, RoR doesn’t have as much documentation online. The PHP data bank, for example, is stuffed with nicely ordered information and practical solutions posted by users. The RoR stuff is fuzzy at best. Some of the things I saw were just plain horrible, and yet people seemed to push them to standard-like levels.

Security: I wasn’t comfortable with the security features offered. While it didn’t matter for my particular project, I will not touch RoR if security is a matter of life and death.

While the application ran relatively fast during initial testing, there was a considerable slowdown with increased traffic. We didn’t actually have to deal with this problem, but it is something I took note of for the future.

I might have missed the boat with some of my observations due to a lack of knowledge and experience, but this is what I have as my up to date. All in all I really enjoyed the intro and would definitely go the RoR way again for small and medium sized projects.