Ruby on Rails vs other languages / platforms / frameworks / stacks

[John Pope]

Hello Rails developers,

Could anyone recommend some white papers on Ruby On Rails in the enterprise?

I need to sell senior management on why rails is the better platform to build and scale a REST API than any other technology / stack.

I've searched through ruby on rails advantages on google -  but can't find anything high level.

My target audience is a corporation who have embedded J2EE, php mysql,dot net and cobalt legacy systems.

The thought of them creating a social networking service using any of these just seems wrong.

Thanks in advance

John Pope | Director 

BG Mobile Apps

Level 5, Suite 2, 2 Hill St, Surry Hills, NSW, 2010

PO Box 81, Waverley, NSW, 2024

T +61423562387  | T #johndpope | W bgmobileapps.com.au

IN http://www.linkedin.com/in/jdpope

[rocketscientist]

John

Don't have whitepapers but happy to discuss offline (work email below)
about the experiences where my development group at Macquarie
University has rolled out a number of applications using RoR. We have
pretty much one of every flavour of language (php, perl, java, c#,
etc) but have introduced Rails as a better technology/stack with REST
Api to comply with our integration requirements.

regards
Grant
----
Grant Sayer
Development Manager, Informatics Dept, Macquarie University
(e) grant...@mq.edu.au
(m) 0403-174-226

> T +61423562387  | T #johndpope <http://www.twitter.com/johndpope> | W *
> bgmobileapps.com.au <http://www.bgmobileapps.com.au/>*
> INhttp://www.linkedin.com/in/jdpope

[Tim Uckun]

These days most frameworks crib from each other so there are a lot of
rails like frameworks for java, php, C# etc. The big difference is in
the language, tooling, and community.

In the end I think it's going to come down to what makes your
developers happier. Ruby and Rails are very developer friendly and I
submit a happy developer puts out better code.



On Mon, May 14, 2012 at 7:20 PM, John Pope <j...@bellgeorge.com>
wrote:hese dddw[pw

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[Steven Ringo]

John,

Unfortunately corporations look at this quite differently to smaller organisations and startups. Corporations tend to look at these things from a financial and maintainability point of view.

If the organisation is already locked in to a development stack/s, its usually quite hard to get them to buy into another stack. It means additional investment not only in developer resource but in maintenance (hosting etc), security and support.

It can be argued that the people pulling the purse strings in most organisations where this is not a line function, don't really care about the technology. In fact many eschew open source for the belief of lack of commercial support. Hence why Microsoft and Oracle, and Red Hat (commercial built on open source) are so popular in bug business.

Then there's the investment they've already made in hardware and operating systems. To have to support an additional stack and have staff that can intercept and support calls when something in a new stack goes down makes many a CIO/CTO I have met feel uneasy.

Fortunately with Rails, you might be able to get away with implementing on JRuby (hence being able to use their J2EE stacks) and using the mysql infrastructure they might already have.

You're probably in for a bit of an uphill battle. I think if you can convince them that your solution is superior in terms of overall cost and ease of use over another solution, you should have a win.

And make sure you come up with a good argument when they tell you Facebook is built on php. Here's a good place to start :-) http://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/

Happy to chat further offline.

Steve

[Rob Dawson]

Hi John,

Here are some old articles from a corporate standpoint focusing on rails.

http://martinfowler.com/articles/rubyAtThoughtWorks.html

http://quotedprintable.com/2005/12/21/the-business-case-for-ruby-on-rails

The Martin Fowler article might be particularly useful.  Thoughtworks target rails in the enterprise, so there might be some other collateral from them.

Rob

[Korny Sietsma]

I'll look around.  I was also going to point out the Tech Radar, but Rails is now such a standard technology that it doesn't show up on the radar any more :)

- Korny

--
Kornelis Sietsma  korny at my surname dot com http://korny.info
"We do not quit playing because we grow old, we grow old because we quit playing" - O.W. Holmes

[Nicholas Faiz]

Hi John,

I think there are scenarios where Rails isn't the best platform choice for a scalable REST API, or even Ruby as a language.

It really depends on things like the nature of the app you're building, what systems it has to communicate with, what capabilities your developers have, and the response times you require. 

You mention a social networking service, but it's hard to know precisely what you're building. There are some circumstances for e.g, where I'd use Node.js over Rails, and others where I'd prefer Sinatra to Rails. It really depends what you're trying to achieve.

Cheers,

Nicholas