Computer

Published by the IEEE Computer Society

T E C H N O L O G Y N E W S

I

n software development, there

has long been a gap between

quick but not-so-clean pro-

gramming 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, pro-

ductive approach that produces reli-

able, clean applications more quickly,

using less code. Enter Ruby on Rails.

The Rails application-develop-

ment framework is based on Ruby,

an open source, object-oriented

scripting language similar to Perl and

Smalltalk. Rails uses integrated pro-

gramming packages and preset code,

known as conventions, designed to

be complete and ready to use imme-

diately, without configuration.

This differs from many other pro-

gramming 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

percent of programmers use [it] reg-

ularly,” 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 chal-

lenges, such as developers’ reluctance

to use a relatively untested frame-

work instead of more established ap-

proaches such as Sun Microsystems’

Java and Microsoft’s .NET.

Rails, released publicly in 2004, is

free and available under an MIT li-

cense (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

programming language of Ruby into

a specific solution for creating Web

applications, giving it direction and

thereby putting “Ruby on Rails,” he

explained.

Rails uses a model-view-controller

approach to application develop-

ment.

The framework provides the tools

necessary to produce a Web-appli-

cation model, which is the underly-

ing program itself. The Active

Record package, Rails’ object-rela-

tional mapper, connects program-

ming objects to database tables so

that users can access information

they want from a database.

Unlike most ORMs—programs

that map objects to specific infor-

mation fields in a relational data-

base—Rails’ ORM is based on con-

vention over configuration, accord-

ing to Heinemeier Hansson. This

means developers don’t have to

spend time designing and configur-

ing 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 con-

ventions and templates.

Rails’ Action View component

generates views, which represent the

visual appearance of an application’s

response to a request.

In application development, con-

trollers connect the program with its

interface and handle communication

between them. The Action Control-

ler 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 ren-

ders the HTML response to the re-

quest, which it then sends back to

the browser.

February 2006

designed to work together. They thus

must spend time and money to make

them work together, which takes

away from the application develop-

ment itself, he said.

Rails is code-efficient in part be-

cause it uses the don’t-repeat-your-

self 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 in-

stances 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 consider-

able textual overhead and a prolifer-

ation of program files, he noted.

Action View templates work with

Ruby and thereby simplify develop-

ers’work by not forcing them to learn

a specialized templating language,

according to Hibbs. Many other ap-

plication-development frameworks

use a language just for templates be-

cause their main programming lan-

guage isn’t expressive enough, noted

Heinemeier Hansson.

Rails has another interface com-

ponent called Builder that generates

responses to XML—rather than

HTML—requests, such as those

used in Web services.

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 lan-

guage, 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 con-

ventions that make development

much quicker, Heinemeier Hansson

added.

Moreover, he said, with Ruby, de-

velopers can do things that generally

are considered bad practice—and

that other languages might make

difficult—but that are the most effi-

cient approach under certain cir-

cumstances.

A single Rails developer can do

the work of an entire team using

Java, and a group of Rails develop-

ers 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-develop-

ment 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.

Tate said that if a Rails-built ap-

plication turns out to be missing

something, developers can simply

make the needed changes to the ap-

propriate class and plug it back into

the framework. “I have seen a secu-

rity-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 com-

plete Web-application development

approach. Instead, he explained, Java

developers often must combine mul-

tiple frameworks, which often aren’t

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-devel-

opment company that uses Rails.

The approach was designed specifically to develop Web-application infrastruc-

ture,according to Rails inventor David Heinemeier Hansson,a partner and pro-

grammer 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’ applica-

tion for collecting customer or transaction data and saving it in a relational data-

base 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 devel-

opment 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 pregnancy-

related 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 host-

ing,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.

Computer

would call that a negative if I were

securing a nuclear reactor.”

“[Rails] is based on a program-

ming language with which most de-

velopers are not familiar,” noted

Monson-Haefel. “Thus, the ecosys-

tem around Ruby isn’t as healthy as

it is for Java. It’s harder to find train-

ing, and it’s harder to find tools.”

According to Tate, “Ruby is a lot

more dynamic [than other lan-

guages], so you have to know what

you are doing with it.”

Because Rails is in its early stages,

no one has built integrated develop-

ment 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 foun-

dational code may result in instabil-

ity in Rails,” he said. “This was the

problem I encountered.”

He noted, “Ruby 1.8.3 was re-

leased and adopted by the Rails com-

munity. However, Rails breaks under

1.8.3 because Ruby developers did

not test for compatibility with Rails.

Also, MySQL (an open source rela-

tional database) adopted a new user-

authentication 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, de-

spite being only a few months old,

was out of date and, consequently,

incorrect.”

In Rails, Hibbs explained, a pre-

programmed method within a con-

troller 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 pro-

grams 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 config-

ure their applications when such

normal behavior isn’t desired.

According to Heinemeier Hansson,

many application-development ap-

proaches assume maximum user flex-

ibility 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.’”

Because it’s so new, said Richard

Monson-Haefel, senior analyst for

application platform strategies service

with the Burton Group, a market re-

search 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

Nonetheless, Tate said, developers

are still willing to test the technol-

ogy, but their managers are either re-

luctant to try something so new or

want to continue using development

approaches in which their compa-

nies have already invested.

N

ot all software experts are op-

timistic about Rails’ future.

“My reaction is that it is yet an-

other load of hype,” said Les Hatton,

founder of Oakwood Computing, a

software vendor and consultancy.

“Why do we need yet another amaz-

ing new dynamic Web environment

when half of the world’s Web sites are

unreliable and the rest are under con-

tinuous attack by phishers, hackers,

and so on? Will Ruby on Rails help

this? I very much doubt it.”

The Burton Group’s Monson-

Haefel 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 inde-

pendent consultants doing projects

for small- to medium-sized compa-

nies, simply because of the produc-

tivity 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 pro-

ductive 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.” I

T E C H N O L O G Y N E W S