Working With Rails

Still working on it.

At my previous job it was a natural progression – I got it in the door with a couple of small internals app. Then everyone saw how fast I was developing, and my boss let us go all Rails all the time.

Stealth :)
No really, only programmer where I work, so I did one part of our site in rails and said hey look at this, I developed it quicker, the code is cleaner, and I haven’t even fully got up to speed on it

As a freelance developer, I can almost always pick what technology I use on a project. But I always research first in my own internal projects before I use any given technology for a client.
I gave Ruby and Ruby on Rails a two month learning period with almost nightly reading and hacking with the book “Agile Web Development with Rails”. This was followed by a four month internal project, referring back to the book when I got stuck, looking for answers online, etc. Once I was comfortable using the technology for real work, I went looking for real projects. I was lucky that a friend had actually started a project of his own using Rails and was looking to hire someone to take over development when he got too busy to continue working on it.

Smooth. I interviewed for the job in December 06, we talked about the technology that had been chosen for the new project (microplace.com) and I suggested Rails.

I had no real experience with rails, only a few small toy apps. The same went for everyone else on the team. Java and dotnet would have been a much more natural choice, but everyone was intrigued by rails so we went for it.

The business folks were relatively nervous about the choice but ultimately they let the tech team make the technical decisions, and everything worked out.

My plan b was to build the site on my own time using Rails and after a a couple of weeks compare what we had done as a team in java/.net with what I have built with rails on my own. I have no idea if this plan was a good one or not, since plan A worked just fine.

I’m dealing with another programmer that has an established PHP code base. It’s absolutely horrid and doesn’t even use MVC principles, no documentation, or whatever, and doesn’t believe in using standards “because they are slow”. So it’s not really an option for me to develop on it. I’m working in a startup type environment and just writing my own thing and hoping to out develop the other guy. Once I get up to speed I’m hoping the benefits should be obvious.

Well, as the only developer at my employer, I chose Rails for a complete site re-do. The current sites I maintain in ASP.NET, Coldfusion and PHP drive me absolutely batty! Code organization is horrendous and everything is hodge-podged and intermingled. But I almost chose against Rails when I saw what deploying it was like! We host our own servers in-house. I was also the Windows systems administrator at the time I started the project and I almost gave up on it all. But I hung in there and now I know a little something about Linux and friends to boot!

Well, when I joined my current company everything was implemented either as local Access databases or as a crazy combination of WinForms and Asp.NET. I tried my best to convince everybody of the advantages of Rails, but nobody wanted to believe me. So I chose the path of recreating an existing application in rails. Ok, that’s not entirely true, as the rebuild was far more advanced with respect to functionality and far easier when it comes to the user interface. It took some time until my coworkers started to adept to this new application. but now, after one year and some code cleanup, they go crazy about it. In order to implement all these new features they would love to see, I would have to quit working for our external customers – currently not possible.
So from being the underdog application, this rails app has become the most essential tool everybody is working with. This includes developers, management, accounting, and even external customers can access the system to check project status. And I got a go for my apprentice to learn rails right now, so I can assign him to the project soon.

I was tinkering with rails in my spare time trying to covertly come up with a clone of our legacy perl/cgi web app. After a sales meeting post-mortem, my boss and I had a chat about how our current software falls short and how I have lots of trouble with patching its unorganized spaghetti code; making changes to an undocumented, un-testable, and non-revision-controlled codebase.

He said that perhaps we should give some consideration to re-architecting it. My boss knew I was going to the local Ruby and Rails meetup regularly, and asked how feasible it would be to rewrite in Rails.

I’m way past my estimated release date right now, but I can attribute a lot of that to my wanting to provision and setup a new server (our existing infrastructure is all windows server), set up subversion repository, set up Retrospectiva (like Trac but written in rails) to track the repository and serve as trouble ticket system, and get a handle on deploying rails with apache and capistrano.

I’m still churning out high-quality organized code in a fraction of the time I could have brought the legacy app up to snuff.

Put Ruby and Ruby on Rails books on everyone’s desks!

We have Ruby on Rails books on at least 30 desks here. Although, our clients still demand Java, so we’re quite slow in getting our client base adopted on RoR.

Kevin Elliott
WeLikeFood Beta
Great restaurants. Great reviews.

Our CIO helped develop our many of our applications, and it was a simple matter of trying Rails first on a small, domain-specific prototype to show how much better it was compared to the way we were doing things at the time. Also, I am the technical lead of our team, so getting the rest of the team to embrace Rails was done through a series of short trainings and a lot of “Check out how cool this is, we cannot do that with our current framework” intermissions.

For me it was a combination of stealth and having some clout. I built a quick demo app to show how we could port part of our legacy (client-server) app to Rails and the productivity sold the framework.

Here I have lots of different responsabilities: I analyse the problem, I choose the right technology to solve it and I present all that to my manager. Then I implement and test it, put into production and them mantain the whole thing.
So I can say that I have some liberty on choosing my tools. I love Ruby and saw that I could use Ruby and Rails here for a lot of things, so gradually I started to develop some new things using Rails. It was good, because I could learn it with real projects, the learning proccess was quicker.

I’m a freelancer and have been able to pursuade a two clients to go rails simply on cost alone. One client was a microsoft-shop technical college, we installed four separate apps each as a windows service running mongrel. As internal intranet apps the fact that each had its own port number wasn’t an issue for them.

The other was a client with high expectations but not a lot of time and money. I explained that Rails was their only option given time budget and built quite a complex project management tool with lots of Ajax. I quite impressed myswlf on that one.

I’m based in London, England. I’d really like to contribute to the Rails Community but by raising awareness and making it more known and understood by business. Anyone else had any experience of this ?

Stephen,

A company not far from where I work, Mission Data, did something like this for Ruby (and by extension, Rails), back in ‘06. They did a presentation called “You’ll Be Seeing Ruby,” and posted about it at http://www.missiondata.com/blog/presentation-youll-be-seeing-ruby/. It might give you some ideas about how to get the local business community interested.

Thanks Ernie, what I’m really hoping to do is put together a presentation that addresses non-IT people which tells budget holders just how much money they’re likely to save and project managers just how quick things will get built and just how happy their end-users will be.

I used to be a civil engineer and am pretty used to doing this kind of public PR work for past employers, I suspect that this is how I can contribute most effectively to the community.

If I’m honest, one of the big challenges in London is that many firms don’t have high expectations of their IT departments so there are a lot of people living in a very comfortable zone and there’s no imperative to change that. I think the thrust will be something along the lines of ‘you can expect your IT department to do the kind of things you’d like it to do’.

What would be useful is some basic metrics that underpin the rails advantage, simple stuff like x many companies believed rails saved them y amount of time or z amount in cost or perceived improvement in user satisfaction. Anyone know of a good place to find this ? If not I’m happy to run such a survey and publish the results openly for us all to use.

With the economic downturn then there are some strong arguments for choosing rails, it would just be nice to be able to put numbers against it for the decision-makers/bean-counters.

Rails will be a very hard sell if you approach it in the usual top-down enterprise sales mentality. It’s sometimes easier to arrange to demo the tech for the techies in an organization, and let them do their own evangelism.

If you’re looking to sell the Rails to the enterprise in a top-down manner, though, you might have a bit of luck by selling Agile development methodologies in general, which Rails excels at. You might even toss a few copies of Getting Real in the laps of a few key decision makers. It’s a quick, enjoyable, and energizing read, and might shake things up a bit if management reads it with an open mind.

As you know, Rails is opinionated software. Remember: when you’re attempting to sell something opinionated, the first step is to convince the buyer that they share the opinion. Then they sell themselves.

Thanks Ernie that’s really helping me to crystalize my thinking. I take your point about top-down selling but it can’t be any harder than getting IT people to consider something different to what they know. The only rails apps I’ve managed to deploy into a large and established IT environment have been to a cash-strapped Microsoft shop where the bottom line was just so attractive that the management couldn’t say no. We had to overcome initial hostility from IT support but by that time the management were very keen to see it work, and it did.

I’m thinking that gathering statistics will remove any sense of evangelism.

Based on your above statements, it sounds like you already have the perfect beginnings for an interesting white paper to distribute. Case studies such as those are inherently interesting to executives. :)

What was really interesting was the reaction to installing the first app using mongrel as a windows service. Once the app had the words ‘windows service’ in front of it somehow the hostility seemed to drain away. It’s an approach I’m planning to reuse heavily.