The never-ending desire for riveting Web sites that “pull eyeballs”, lengthen stay and induce return visits has, since 2004, complicated the life of Web application engineers.  Enriching a page with Flash, embedded video, visitor talkback, and self-serve communication channels means developer teams need varied expertise in Ajax, Web services and allied technological tools.  Happily, Yukihiro Matsumoto authored the Ruby on Rails language and offered it up as a Web 2.0 framework option with the simple immediacy of PHP and the familiar architecture, clean code and robust quality of Java.

At a briefing I attended earlier this week, a Project Manager at HyTech Professionals out in Nashua (www.hytechpro.com) raved about the agile development they have managed for hundreds of clients with Ruby on Rails.  At the core, he claimed, all a developer really need attend to is a Web server, a database engine and such sparse code it’s unbelievable.  This independent software house found it could slash time to market with the speed and ease with which RoR could generate rich, database-driven Web 2.0 projects.

Still, hands-on experience with a solid client base demonstrated two things to bear in mind:

      Ruby on Rails is not the silver bullet that sweeps away the complexity of J2EE.  Matsumoto never did claim RoR was a comprehensive enterprise IDE.  Rather, the platform seems to have worked very well as a leaner replacement for combos like Tomcat and JDBC.

      Developers have still endured manual processes and practices.  Needless to say, this has meant an active search for a killer app IDE to overlay on RoR.  Let me tell you what I turned up in my next post.