Ruby on the Rails is designed to do it all and quickly.  Many of the nuts and bolts of development are integrated into the framework already, and many developers are learning to love Ruby on the Rails.  That being the case, here are some features about it which may prove useful to you if you are planning to implement the Ruby on the Rails framework into your field of web development.

Traditional architecture problems

When building a web application, traditional architectural problems such as persistence, logging, application development, script building, web tier components, and workflow raise their ugly heads.  This makes web development a complex and time consuming process.  The Ruby on the Rails framework takes a very different approach to the problem, by making all the decisions for you, allowing you to concentrate on solving development problems.  This dramatically speeds up the process, and can shave months off time consuming development.

Pragmatism and databasing

One of the ways Rails speeds up productivity is that in all layers of the architecture, it takes a convention over configuration approach.  Once the developer is familiar with Rail’s constraints and rules, the need for specialised management tools is negated, as Rails generates the connection for your view to the controller and the model, and the model to the database.  Surprisingly, Rails manages to get all this to work.

Object-orientated language

Ruby is a fully featured object orientated language.  This sets it apart from its contemporaries.  Another good feature of Ruby is mix-ins modules which can be inserted in classes, blocks and closures.  These provide independent code which simplify client code behaviour  These features give Ruby a distinct advantage over other productive scripting languages.  .Net and java are out performed by Ruby’s dynamic nature, and the Rail’s framework gives added advantages due to the way it has been configured.

Documents and dynamic content

Rail’s templating technology allows the generation of any dynamic content documents, such as emails, web pages or xml documents.

Mapping Tools

Active record is a very good object related mapping tool.  In effect it brings you closer to the structure of the database than other object orientated development methodologies,  and provides an answer to database persistence, through seamlessly persisting your model to the database.

Web technologies

Rails is able to support a variety of web technologies, and with its hallmark out of the box solutions, it is able to provide a complete package down to configuration in development, test and production environments to email integration.  Due to Ruby’s dynamic nature, it is able to simply and seamlessly integrate with Rails.  It is also able to provide a rich interface for operations that Ajax provides, which is good for Web 2.0.

Rollback

With Rails, you are able to move forward and backwards between database versions, and with Ruby you can roll back scripts.  This is especially useful if you are migrating databases across to Ruby on the Rails.  Considering most software projects do not reach a point where they are able to do this, this is a big plus.

Implementing changes.

Ruby on the Rails again saves time, by making it simple to implement changes, and as the test cycle stage is reached much sooner, increases productivity considerably.   Rails immediately initiates changes, and this allows developers to switch between fix and test cycles.  This saves money on redeploying the application.  Ruby, on the other hand has easily testable code.  There is no need for external tools as methods and objects are replaceable at runtime, without them.

Coding

As the generators in Rail’s do a lot of the coding for you, productivity is increased as there are less lines of code to write.  Also experienced Rails developers will discover idioms to speed up the process too.

Support

Ruby on the rails is open source and well supported.  This is always a very good feature for any framework of this kind.


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