The Philosophy of Rails Developers

The Philosophy of Rails Developers

Launching a Web 2.0 project, independent software vendors (ISVs) are deeply concerned about the scope of their venture, as well as profitability. However, facing the overwhelming choice of an appropriate Web technology, ISVs may get confused. What kind of a development team is to be employed for their type of project, Silverlight, Adobe Flex, Java FX, Rails developers, or any other? Concerning technologies, each has its pros and cons, and the choice shall depend on the project and on the type of goals set b y a customer. If you consider employing a team of Rails developers, the following information  could be of interest to you .

Ruby on Rails can be defined as an open source Web development environment, which, inspite of its simplicity, proves to be powerful. Rails developers are highly requested on IT market, taking into account such obvious advantages of Ruby on Rails technology, as integrated testing, less code, flexibility of the Model-View-Controller design pattern, and rapid Web development enabled by this technology. A good example is the creation of a new blog engine, which takes Rails developers no more than 15 minutes, or a search system, which takes around five.

Rails developers' community is noted for its philosophy, which in its original form was introduced by David Heinemeier Hansson, who gave impetus to the first release of Ruby on Rails as open source in July 2004.

According to the Ruby development philosophy, two main principles are emphasized:

1. Convention over Configuration (CoC). As far as this principle is concerned, most part of configuration data can be omitted by Rails developers via implementing practical conventions (conventions can surely be overridden with configuration, when there is a need to do that).

2. Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY). It means that each element of any Web application is specifically located and there's no need to repeat it several times across different files. If Rails developers use, for instance, the ActiveRecord module of Rails, there’s no need to specify database column names in class definitions. This information can be retrieved from the database based on the class name. This principle is applied not only in Ruby development, but other technologies, as well.

Besides, the third principle is sometimes suggested by Rails developers to be included into Rails philosophy:

3. Quick Turn-Around Time. When a developer provides an integrated Web server and an integrated language, it is possible to see the results of code changes straightaway. This sufficiently lessens the amount of code-debugging work.

The philosophy of Rails developers has appealed to many Web 2.0 companies and, as a result, became the basis for such well-known projects, as Twitter, Yellowpages, Base Camp, CrunchBase, etc.

As any other Web application framework, Ruby on Rails has its pros and cons. However, if rapid Web development is what you are looking for, then working with a Rails developers' team is an option to be seriously taken into consideration. After all, its philosophy significantly simplifies Web application development and thus allows energy to be directed at the creative side of the development process, making your project stand out among the rest.