In this post: why Ruby? why Rails? why not? It sort of fizzles out at the end.

First - a quick definition. What is Ruby on Rails? Ruby is a programming language. Ruby on Rails is a framework for developing modern, database driven web-based apps that is written in Ruby. To grossly generalize - the framework takes care of the common tasks that are part of developing a working webapp - responding to URLs, rendering pages, usually communicating with a database.

People are often curious about why I chose Ruby on Rails for Ravelry. The truthful answer? Prior to Ravelry, I spent 6ish years developing web applications with Java (specifically Struts and then Struts 2) and the fun was gone. Java as a language had become old hat and the Java web application development community felt fractured, tired, and underenthused. I just wasn’t having any fun. I started working on Ravelry because I thought that it would be an interesting and enjoyable project and Ruby on Rails looked like it would take away drudgery and give me some of excitement. It definitely did - I love working with both Ruby and Rails and I’m glad that I made that decision.

There are lots of reasons to choose Ruby and Rails for your next web project. The short response? Productivity and Fun.

Ruby is beautiful

The Ruby site includes the caption: “a programmer’s best friend”. I couldn’t agree more. Working with Ruby has made programming fun again. Ruby code is fun to write - it is terse, flexible, pretty, and natural. If I need to write a bit of code to solve a general problem (outside of any work that I am doing) I always pick up Ruby first.

Matz, creator of Ruby, often speaks about Ruby and feeling:

“Instead of emphasizing the what, I want to emphasize the how part: how we feel while programming. That’s Ruby’s main difference from other language designs. I emphasize the feeling, in particular, how I feel using Ruby.”

Check out why’s (poignant) guide to ruby for a fun introduction to the language.

Rails is smart

Ruby on Rails understands the needs of web application developers and this understanding has saved me massive amounts of time. Without Rails I could have wasted a lot of time with unnecessary SQL, overly verbose and complex views/pages, ugly XML configuration files, clunky code… Rails is designed to feel like a specialized language for building software for the web and it shows. Common tasks are made easy and Ruby (the language) picks up the slack if you need to move outside of the real of the usual.

There is no way that I would have been able to develop Ravelry with the same speed and ease without Rails. There are now many Rails-like frameworks for other languages - a testament to how many things Rails got right.

thriving community

The Ruby/Rails communities are very active and very engaged. It’s a great place to be - there are so many interesting things going on that it’s hard to keep up. Very active projects, tons of great Ruby blogs, all kinds of books and other documentation. The huge community of enthused Rubyists is a very valuable thing.

I check http://del.icio.us/popular/ruby and http://del.icio.us/popular/rails daily so that I can keep up on all the cool Ruby and Rails related stuff that is going on in the world.

scaling is easy

Ravelry moved from a slice of a server to a full server and then on to 8 virtual servers with no architectural changes. Ruby on Rails doesn’t scale for you, it just leads you into building a scalable application from the beginning.

…and of course, there are downsides. These aren’t issues for me, but they may be for you:

more resource intensive (downside)

Your Ruby on Rails app is going to need more CPU power and more memory than an application written with PHP, Java, etc. You’ll need the CPU for Ruby - it is not as efficient as other languages (yet) and will suck up more processing power. The memory is for your Mongrels. Mongrel is one of the best ways to run your app (I guess you can call it an “application server”) and you typically have to run many Mongrel instances because each can only handle one request at a time. 10 Mongrels could easily cost you 1 GB of memory.

always on edge (downside)

If you don’t feel comfortable running the latest and greatest code (think brand spanking new code checked out from Subversion) and keeping up with what is going on inside the community, you may miss out on many of the benefits. Things change very quickly in Rubyland and you’ll get the best experience and the best information and documentation if you come along for the ride.