Ruby on Rails: a design decision 30 Nov 09
We had heard about Ruby on Rails and how efficiently one can create web applications with a handful of good developers and we were intrigued to find out more. Due to budgetary constraints we would not use a platform that we would have to pay for to run our service and we all had now used open source components for years. After playing around with Ruby on Rails for a while we were convinced that Ruby on Rails really is a great language/framework combination. We also felt very quickly at home with the Ruby language itself and found a huge amount of plugins/gems and a vibrant community. Also there are many great online services out there already running on Ruby on Rails on Linux for a while, so the majority of issues running an online service were already ironed out. But what really convinced us was that it implements the tried and tested model view controller pattern in an easy and straightforward way. We were sold.
Once again we are not advocating that Ruby on Rails is the only right choice but at the time we felt that it was the optimal choice given our background. Ruby on Rails in the end is just a tool set and there are many great tool sets out there that have their place in the right context. At the time of the post we are still very enthusiastic about our choice.