TECHNOLOGY NEWS
Will Software
Developers
Ride Ruby on
Rails to Success?
David Geer
I
n software development, there
has long been a gap between
quick but not-so-clean programming approaches like PHP
scripting and slow but clean and
solid approaches such as Java.
Many programmers have wanted
the best of both worlds: a fast, productive approach that produces reliable, clean applications more quickly,
using less code. Enter Ruby on Rails.
The Rails application-development framework is based on Ruby,
an open source, object-oriented
scripting language similar to Perl and
Smalltalk. Rails uses integrated programming packages and preset code,
known as conventions, designed to
be complete and ready to use immediately, without configuration.
This differs from many other programming environments, such as
those based on Java, that require
using several frameworks—which
developers must configure because
they don’t natively work together—
to get all desired capabilities.
Proponents say Rails is best suited
to building infrastructures that pull
information from a database to a
Web application such as those used
in e-commerce, online communities,
and data retrieval.
Several projects have already used
Rails, but the approach is still very
new. “I would guess no more than 5
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percent of programmers use [it] regularly,” said Stephen Downes, senior
researcher at the National Research
Council of Canada’s Institute for
Information Technology. However,
as the “Putting Ruby on Rails to
Use” sidebar indicates, the approach
is growing in popularity.
Nonetheless, Rails still faces challenges, such as developers’ reluctance
to use a relatively untested framework instead of more established approaches such as Sun Microsystems’
Java and Microsoft’s .NET.
ABOUT RUBY ON RAILS
Rails, released publicly in 2004, is
free and available under an MIT license (www.opensource.org/licenses/
mit-license.php).
David Heinemeier Hansson, a
partner and programmer with the
37signals application-development
firm, designed Rails by extracting
various features from Basecamp,
a Ruby-based project-management
tool he worked on.
Rails turned the general-purpose
Published by the IEEE Computer Society
programming language of Ruby into
a specific solution for creating Web
applications, giving it direction and
thereby putting “Ruby on Rails,” he
explained.
Development approach
Rails uses a model-view-controller
approach to application development.
The framework provides the tools
necessary to produce a Web-application model, which is the underlying program itself. The Active
Record package, Rails’ object-relational mapper, connects programming objects to database tables so
that users can access information
they want from a database.
Unlike most ORMs—programs
that map objects to specific information fields in a relational database—Rails’ ORM is based on convention over configuration, according to Heinemeier Hansson. This
means developers don’t have to
spend time designing and configuring code that specifies how a table
relates to a class of objects, as is the
case with many other programming
environments. Rails accomplishes
this automatically via precoded conventions and templates.
Rails’ Action View component
generates views, which represent the
visual appearance of an application’s
response to a request.
In application development, controllers connect the program with its
interface and handle communication
between them. The Action Controller performs controller development
in Rails.
The Action Controller receives
Web-based requests for information
in a database, parses and decodes
them to determine what the user
wants, and then decides which piece
of application code should handle
the task, explained Curt Hibbs, a
Boeing software developer and a
Rails advocate.
Rails’ Action View template renders the HTML response to the request, which it then sends back to
the browser.
Action View templates work with
Ruby and thereby simplify developers’ work by not forcing them to learn
a specialized templating language,
according to Hibbs. Many other application-development frameworks
use a language just for templates because their main programming language isn’t expressive enough, noted
Heinemeier Hansson.
Rails has another interface component called Builder that generates
responses to XML—rather than
HTML—requests, such as those
used in Web services.
Ruby
Clean, concise, consistent, and
structured like languages such as
Java, Ruby also offers the speed and
ease of use of scripting languages such
as PHP, according to Heinemeier
Hansson.
Ruby is a powerful dynamic language, so instead of writing large
amounts of code, developers can
declare commands efficiently with
subtle inferences via small amounts
of code, he explained. Ruby can be
used to write templates and conventions that make development
much quicker, Heinemeier Hansson
added.
Moreover, he said, with Ruby, developers can do things that generally
are considered bad practice—and
that other languages might make
difficult—but that are the most efficient approach under certain circumstances.
ADVANTAGES
A single Rails developer can do
the work of an entire team using
Java, and a group of Rails developers can do projects in a month that
would take six months with Java,
according to Boeing’s Hibbs.
Bruce Tate, president and owner
of J2Life, an application-development company, said that in building
a start-up project for a customer, his
company used 25 percent of the code
and spent 10 percent of the time on
configuration with Rails that it
would have experienced with Java.
Putting Ruby on Rails to Use
As of early January 2006, the Ruby on Rails development environment had
been downloaded almost 230,000 times, according to project statistics at
http://gems.rubyforge.org/stats.html.“We’re going to hit 1 million by the end of
2006,” predicted Bruce Tate, president and owner of J2Life, an application-development company that uses Rails.
The approach was designed specifically to develop Web-application infrastructure, according to Rails inventor David Heinemeier Hansson, a partner and programmer with the 37signals application-development firm.
Rails’ niche is database-backed applications presenting a Web front, added Curt
Hibbs, a software developer for Boeing and a Rails advocate.
An ideal Rails development scenario might involve a start-up business’ application for collecting customer or transaction data and saving it in a relational database so that users could access the information via the Internet, explained Tate.
A start-up might be willing to trade a little risk by using a less-well-established
development framework in exchange for a lot of productivity, he said.
A more established business in a conservative industry, such as banking, has
probably used many of its applications for years and doesn’t need as much development productivity and also might not want to try a new technology, he noted.
CD Baby, a CD store, has been converting its site from PHP to Rails over the
past year, according to Hibbs. Other applications built with Rails, Heinemeier
Hansson said, include bellybutton (www.bellybutton.de), which sells pregnancyrelated merchandise, and three social-networking sites built by the Robot Co-op
(www.robotcoop.com): 43 Things, 43 Places, and 43 People.
Odeo, an audio-sharing portal, and Strongspace, which offers secure file hosting, were also built with Rails.
Now that the technology is becoming more popular, Hibbs said, seven books
about Rails are in the works. Until now, there has been just one book on the topic.
And the first Ruby on Rails conference—RailsConf 2006 (http://railsconf.
org)—is planned for 22-25 June in Chicago.
Tate said that if a Rails-built application turns out to be missing
something, developers can simply
make the needed changes to the appropriate class and plug it back into
the framework. “I have seen a security-manager [component] modified
[in Rails] with just 82 lines of code,”
he noted.
In addition, Rails is a completely
integrated, full-stack environment,
with all components designed to
work together, according to Hibbs.
This is not the case with many other
development environments.
For example, Hibbs explained, very
few Java frameworks provide a complete Web-application development
approach. Instead, he explained, Java
developers often must combine multiple frameworks, which often aren’t
designed to work together. They thus
must spend time and money to make
them work together, which takes
away from the application development itself, he said.
Rails is code-efficient in part because it uses the don’t-repeat-yourself principle. Rails applications
generally use the same code for the
same purpose throughout. And by
modifying a set of code in one place,
developers can also change other instances of the same code set.
In some other types of development
frameworks, such as the Java-based
Apache Struts, Hibbs said, designers
must write an entire class for every
command, each of which must be in
a separate file. This creates considerable textual overhead and a proliferation of program files, he noted.
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In Rails, Hibbs explained, a preprogrammed method within a controller class handles each command,
which requires very little textual
overhead, and all related commands
can occupy the same file. This greatly
reduces the amount of work and
code necessary in Rails.
Rails also entails assumptions,
which means that without the need
for any configuration, it builds programs that automatically behave as
Web applications generally behave.
For example, Heinemeier Hansson
noted, Rails makes the assumption
that in a Web application, a database
table—such as one called “cars”—
will includes multiple classes of the
same general type—such as “sports
cars” and “SUVs.”
Developers would have to configure their applications when such
normal behavior isn’t desired.
According to Heinemeier Hansson,
many application-development approaches assume maximum user flexibility is most desirable and thus
require considerable configuration to
ensure that flexibility.
On the other hand, he explained,
“Rails says, ‘Let’s make it easy for
what most people need to do most
of the time. Let’s optimize for that
scenario. And sure, let’s have enough
flexibility to make it possible to do
something else.’”
DERAILING RUBY ON RAILS
Because it’s so new, said Richard
Monson-Haefel, senior analyst for
application platform strategies service
with the Burton Group, a market research firm, “I wouldn’t use Rails for
something that is mission critical.”
Developers don’t know yet
whether Rails is sufficiently scalable.
Thus, J2Life’s Tate said, they should
not use it for large projects in which
scalability is important.
The technology also hasn’t been
around long enough to demonstrate
whether it’s secure. Tate said several
e-commerce firms are examining
Rails’ security and have been pleased
so far. However, he added, “It’s still
very early. We just don’t know. I
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would call that a negative if I were
securing a nuclear reactor.”
“[Rails] is based on a programming language with which most developers are not familiar,” noted
Monson-Haefel. “Thus, the ecosystem around Ruby isn’t as healthy as
it is for Java. It’s harder to find training, and it’s harder to find tools.”
According to Tate, “Ruby is a lot
more dynamic [than other languages], so you have to know what
you are doing with it.”
Rails is designed to be
productive but also yield
clean applications.
Because Rails is in its early stages,
no one has built integrated development environments yet. Thus, Rails
tools are primarily command-line
driven, requiring more manual work
by developers.
Like other new technologies, said
the National Research Council of
Canada’s Downes, Rails is evolving
rapidly and not always consistently.
“Like most such code,” Downes
noted, “Rails relies on a foundation
of numerous other applications.”
“This means that upgrades in foundational code may result in instability in Rails,” he said. “This was the
problem I encountered.”
He noted, “Ruby 1.8.3 was released and adopted by the Rails community. However, Rails breaks under
1.8.3 because Ruby developers did
not test for compatibility with Rails.
Also, MySQL (an open source relational database) adopted a new userauthentication system. When Rails
tried to log on to MySQL using the
old system, it failed. Rails was thus
upgraded to adapt to the new
MySQL authentication. However,
this meant that it now fails on older
MySQL systems.”
Moreover, Downes said, “Much
of the documentation I found, despite being only a few months old,
was out of date and, consequently,
incorrect.”
Nonetheless, Tate said, developers
are still willing to test the technology, but their managers are either reluctant to try something so new or
want to continue using development
approaches in which their companies have already invested.
N
ot all software experts are optimistic about Rails’ future.
“My reaction is that it is yet another load of hype,” said Les Hatton,
founder of Oakwood Computing, a
software vendor and consultancy.
“Why do we need yet another amazing new dynamic Web environment
when half of the world’s Web sites are
unreliable and the rest are under continuous attack by phishers, hackers,
and so on? Will Ruby on Rails help
this? I very much doubt it.”
The Burton Group’s MonsonHaefel disagreed: “I think Ruby on
Rails will do well. If it continues to
be adopted at the rate it has been, a
number of tools and libraries will be
available to make it more broadly
applicable. Its ecosystem will grow
around that. I think it’s going to
take off really quickly with independent consultants doing projects
for small- to medium-sized companies, simply because of the productivity advantage.”
“Ruby on Rails or some derivative
of that will become quite popular,”
Monson-Haefel predicted. “It’s a
very easy platform to work with.
Most people will become very productive with it very quickly.”
“After five years,” Boeing’s Hibbs
said, “I expect Ruby on Rails to have
serious penetration in the enterprise.
Looking back on how long it took
Java to take hold in large companies,
I certainly would expect Ruby on
Rails to do the same thing.” ■
David Geer is a freelance technology
writer based in Ashtabula, Ohio. Contact him at [email protected].
Editor: Lee Garber, Computer,
[email protected]