Floyd’s Thoughts…

Wow, isn’t the new SourceForge style absolutely awful?

I love Rails and use it all the time, fortunately the company i work for builds web products that lend them selves to the Rails way, however we also do consultancy work for larger Enterprise companies where Rails doesn’t lend itself so well.

I’d love to see Rails include features that would ease its adoption within the enterprise, here are a few things that i’d like to see:

Better support for Windows
Now it hurts me to say this as everybody here loves OS X and our products are built for OS X or linux deployment but many (i’m inclined to think most) enterprises use Windows for deployment of internal intranet apps.

With the release of Mod_rails, deploying ruby apps into production is now only easy its reliable, Enterprises organizations need both of these things, but i think they need them on windows too.

Support for Stored Procs
Now i now its pretty easy to add this support (and i will get to that later) but having Stored Procs support baked into Rails would make using Rails in a enterprise environment so much easier.

We have been to many large companies to build large internal intranet applications and in every one of them we have had to interface with legacy systems via APIs that are exposed by stored procs.

Telling a client that you are going to use Rails in this environment consistently produces a look of horror from the clients technical guys and follows with a Rails can only do Object Relational Mapping discussion.

Any (that i have met) technical architect in the corporate work will dismiss rails for its (perceived) lack of Stored Proc support.

I’d like to see this functionality baked in to rails and advertised as a “Feature”.

Integrated Development Environment
Right now i can think of at least 6 IDE’s that support rails and thats not including TextMate (which i use).

Of all the IDE’s that i have tried NetBeans is the best, it has good all round support for rails but even still, its miles away from what a corporate developer would consider a good IDE for rails development.

Developers need refactoring tools in any language but the need for good refactoring is greater with dynamic languages, netbeans has one refactoring option enable when using rails “Rename” and even that doesn’t safely rename.

Now i’m not suggesting we need Resharper for rails before corporate developers adopt rails but somewhere in between resharper and what we have now would be a good start.

Address the Scaffolding Myths.
Every rails developer knows that scaffolding was (pre rails v2.x) pretty useless but served a good purpose in helping to increase the Buzz around rails with the promise of one click application stubs.

In rails 2.0 scaffolding is Slightly more useful in that it creates nice Restful controllers and some pages to help you get going with the first few resources in your application however, the Rails community needs to address the perception thats rails is all about scaffolding.

So many times i have had conversations with Tech Leads, Development Managers, Developers, etc about rails being more than scaffolding, usually they are amazed to hear that most rails developers don’t even use scaffolding in there apps.

Its as if this great little feature of rails is holding it back in the minds of “serious” corporate developers, who don’t see scaffolding for what it is.

Database Support
Active Resource is an amazing piece of work, I often go through the Code Base to see how certain things are done and find myself gushing over the code in there its amazing…

However, since Rails v1.2.6 the core team seem to have lost interest in Databases other than sqlite and mysql, which is all good and well for the the Web 2.0 community, however corporate guys need Oracle and/or Microsoft SQL Server support out of the box, and it seems that using either of these engines now requires extra gems and some hacking around. I have had many conversations with devs who “tried” to use rails but couldn’t get it to connect to Oracle. After looking around the web they often got frustrated by the contradicting and out of dat solutions to this problem and gave up.

If rails is living on its promise to give database independence and Rapid development thought active records object relational mapping magic it can’t force corporate developers down a wild goose chasing for gems, it need to work - Out of the box.

The Solution…
Well rails is young and i’m certain that these issues will be resolved given time, however i think its the responsability of all rails developers to increase its presence in the Corporate world when and where ever we can.

As such I’m going to start a Rails in the Enterprise site where issues such as the ones i have highlighted can be discussed, resolved and communicated to the corperate world.

I’m like to see this site become a one stop resource for corporate developers who are trying to use rails.

jQuery is an alternative to the Prototype JavaScript library that is gaining some real traction these days.

jQuery is a fast, concise, JavaScript Library that simplifies how you traverse HTML documents, handle events, perform animations, and add Ajax interactions to your web pages. jQuery is designed to change the way that you write JavaScript.

jQuery also sports an elegant model of method chaining where almost all methods return an instance of the object they are called on, this means you do do stuff like:

	$("p.surprise").addClass("ohmy").show("slow");

The only problem is I love using Rails which has many helper methods that make using Ajax really easy which use the Prototype JS library, so ncluding jQuery as well as Prototype is not only a pain it also means i’m doubling the amount of javascript i ship with each page.

Fortunatly the problem has been solved via a cool rails plugin called jrails.

jrails is easy to install (script/plugin install http://ennerchi.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/plugins/jrails) and replaces all the calls to Prototype with calls to jQeury allowing you to remove prototype from your application without loosing any of the rails magic.