Archive for May, 2008

Introducing RoR to Your Company

New ideas are not easily accepted by everyone and creating a plan of introduction may help you start the process. Here are a few basic steps to introduce Rails:

Highlight the interesting points and advantages of using the Rails technology.
Know your audience. Be aware of what they need and how Rails could meet them.
Explain how Rails differ from other technologies that are in competition with it.
Discuss real applications made with Rails, its development and performance and the system requirements.
Don’t just talk about it, show a screencasts about it.
Demonstrate how to use the Ruby technology, showing them how easy it is to use.

Choice of Technology is Fear-Driven

The choice of technology being used by customers is governed by what they consider as the standard. They don’t risk using those programs not considered to be the regulars, and developers by giving in to them they are selling their customers short. Open source framework such as Ruby on Rails is very agile but people are not that keen to use them for they don’t feel safe. However, vendors have found ways to introduce them and developers have learned how to use them. Constant use have led them to appreciate the RoR and are now convinced of its effectiveness and are enthusiastic with the accomplishments they have achieved.

Operating Ruby

Writing the best program would still be useless if people are clueless as to how it is managed. If you want to be successful in writing programs in Ruby, you should first learn how to run them. Two of the options available for running Ruby are: run commands as arguments that are passed to the ruby executable from a saved file, or from the Interactive Ruby shell; or, run Ruby programs as desktop and web applications. It is harder to make a decision regarding the method of sending the Ruby application to your users than the task of writing the Ruby program.

Rails Uses Dynamic Typing

From the users’ perspective, the main difference between the Ruby programming language and that of the mainstream enterprise technologies is dynamic typing. This means that the need for clearly telling which type of an object it will reference is not needed as oppose to static typing wherein we tell the compiler that a certain variable will only be used to refer to objects of a specified type. On the other hand, in dynamic typing there is no compiler to tell us that we’ve made a mistake, like delivering the wrong type of object to a method, but we’ll get a runtime exception when we perform that specific piece of code.

Major Features of Rails – Part 2

Rails views are formed by a system of template that instantly unites a web page from a layout providing the general makeup for the page.
Rails template system lets you combine HTML and Ruby code, and has a set of helpers to make simpler the initiation of HTML and JavaScript codes. RJS templates permit you to write the Ruby code that its framework converts to JavaScript for implementation in the browser.
Rails has support for caching pages or parts of it to boost performance.
Rails migrations allow you to identify your database plan with Ruby code and to move around from one version to another.

Major Features of Rails

Rails is a compilation of programming libraries used as a method for developing web applications. These are its major aspects:

Rails applies the MVC pattern for application design. – application code is divided into models, views and controllers.
Rails gives foundation classes from which the model and controller classes take over, giving them a whole bunch of capability without scripting a single line of code outside the class declaration.
Rails contains Active Record(AR) module that makes available an ORM that instantiates Ruby objects from database tables automatically.
Rails has a lot of classes and methods to make possible common tasks in web applications.