Comments on: Is Ruby on Rails a Silver Bullet?

By: Sam Halliday

Sam Halliday — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 08:07:04 +0000

It’s interesting to note that Bruce Tate and Justin Gehtland wrote an app in 4 months in Java, then ported to Ruby in four days. Note that I said “ported” not “wrote”. After 4 months of discovering the architectural bugs and learning the traps and pitfalls of a program… rewriting it should be a breeze! Still, 4 nights is bloody fast.

By: John

John — Sun, 27 May 2007 15:38:57 +0000

Nice article. One word: WebObjects. If you know this Rails is “meh”, if you don’t Rails is GOD!

By: There might just be a Silver Bullet « 3Spoken

There might just be a Silver Bullet « 3Spoken — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 07:02:02 +0000

[...] I’ve been using Ruby on Rails on and off for several months and it really does seem to help web application productivity. If you want to read why it successfully contradicts Fred Brooks assertion that there can be no more Silver Bullets, then there is an excellent article just published by 82ASK which states that Rails addresses the new problems inherent in Web application development and does it better than most. [...]

By: Bruce Tate

Bruce Tate — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 14:20:32 +0000

Fantastic article. You have said it better than I. I’ve since taken a CTO role at a company called WellGood, LLC, the makers of ChangingThePresent.org. We’ve come to understand that Rails can make a dramatic difference in our overall productivity. It can’t improve our business processes.

Said another way, if technology is your bottleneck, Rails will rock your world. In this spirit, Rails has been very good to us. It’s very close to a silver bullet in that sense. We’re simply applying a more appropriate technology to the task at hand.

But technology usually isn’t the bottleneck. So in some cases, we make bad decisions, and actually dig a hole faster than before. All in all, we’re good enough from a process perspective, and we have a close enough problem to the ideal Rails niche, that we’re able to be very productive.

By: jerzy prekurat

jerzy prekurat — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 21:02:37 +0000

My initial lack of enthusiasm towards RoR was based exactly on “No Silver Bullet” way of thinking: tools do not address essential difficulties of the problem, most tools address accidental difficulties well enough, so what is the big deal ? YAT, YAT, YAT… (yet another tool)

Well, there is something: it works….

I think this article comes long way towards answering – why it works and where it works. Thanks !

jerzy

By: ilan berci

ilan berci — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 15:43:32 +0000

Simply fantastic artile, (I especially appreciate all the links to the referenced articles!) I agree with you a 100% in the fact that rails provides benefit by simply addressing accidental difficulties but that is what they stated from the very start (as long as you stay on the path and follow their sensical conventions).

Likewise, it obviously won’t improve efficiency in addressing your bussiness model (which framework does) and never make such claims. You need Ruby for that!

Thank you for taking the time to write this, I will forward it to my development group.

ilan