Ruby On Rails - Application Development

Ruby On Rails is a modern web standard to creating today and tomorrow's next generation web applications. Ruby on Rails uses the Model View Controller Design principle which makes software development projects clean and maintainable.

Scott Pustay, founder of Musk Ox Software started using Ruby On Rails in 2007 while at Dimax in Seattle. He used David Heinemeier Hansson's Agile Web Development with Rails and why's (poignant) guide to Ruby to learn Ruby and Rails framework. He started on Rails 1.2 in 2007. He saw Rails evolve to Rails 2 and Rails 3.

Scott's first project in Rails was to prototype a Billing System that could read from 3 data sources and produce a spreadsheet as output. The software would churn out montly invoices automatically. Very quickly it because apparent one developer using Ruby on Rails could accomplish the work of 3 or 4 PHP programmers with a good existing framework. All the heavy lifting of database transactions was already taken care of with active record. Getting data into and out of databases with forms was greatly simplfied.

The first plugin Scott used was technoweenie's (Rick Olson) acts_as_authenticated which later became restful_authentication. This was a simple plugin that added secure user accounts to the app and could integrate with out existing database of users and passwords. This really solidified the power of rails with being being easy to use with existing codebases in Scott's mind.

Rails Porting

Upgrade your web applications to Ruby on Rails. It's never to late to transition over to Ruby on Rails. In fact, sometimes it is even better. If you have a software product that has evolved over the years into something unruly, you can quickly port this code to Ruby on Rails. This will be a lateral move that will pay huge dividends by making future changes easier and getting new developers to understand the existing code base.

Learn more about porting your web software to Ruby on Rails.