Why Ruby on Rails?

Ruby is a beautiful, purely object oriented, interpreted programming language influenced by Perl and Smalltalk, among others. Rails is a web application framework built on top of Ruby that is designed to speed and simplify the development of database-driven web applications. Rails is relatively new and not widely used relative to other web programing languages, but nonetheless its growth has been tremendous. Rails has seen so much growth because of its reputation as the fastest and easiest web development framework. Also, to achieve similar functionality Rails typically requires far fewer lines of code than the more popular web development languages.

When we first started out, we were fairly familiar with Perl and PHP - so it was a difficult decision to attempt to bring the team into the Rails community. We expected that the delay required to learn Rails would be later compensated by faster development. So we decided to learn Ruby and Rails and at least build the Builders' Site prototype with Rails.

The Israeli Rails community is rather small, but nonetheless I attempted to try to attract co-founders and developers for a previous related project through the israel.rb group. There are lots of startups in Israel, and I'm not surprised that demand exceeds supply of capable developers. At the time I was not able to interest any qualified Rails hackers to join the Israel team - part of the problem may have been that none of them knew what the project was really about, only that some bombastic American has a stealth startup.

Despite the lack of Rails experts on the team, the learning curve was not excessive and we were quickly creating some fairly complex functionality. The Rails principle of "Convention over Configuration" helps to speed development of more typical functionality. We encountered some difficulty when our functionality quickly exceeded the convention. Luckily there are some real heroes on the internet who publish their experiences with similar issues and try to help those trying to learn and develop along the same lines.

Critics of Ruby and/ or Rails argue that Ruby is slow and web applications developed in Rails do not 'scale'. Most of this criticism appears to be sour grapes. It is true that there are no blockbuster applications written in Rails, only medium sized applications, but reaching "medium size" exceeds the achievements of the vast majority of web startups. Rails defenders argue that scaling Rails applications simply involves purchasing more servers and hardware, and that the greatest limitations are database related - and all web development languages suffer from this. They argue that savings on developer-hours more than makes up for extra costs in hardware.

The debates continue, as does our development. Perhaps I will post some of the obstacles and specific solutions we found. So far we like Rails, and have no plans to go elsewhere. When we are ready to increase our development or scale the application, perhaps we will consider again all our options. The decision will, in part, depend on the availability of capable developers.