Ruby on Rails In the Real World

Ruby on Rails In the Real World

Continuing with our brief overview of Ruby on Rails as drastically simplified, elegant, and stable platform for agile Web engineering, we take the word of some impressively-experienced RoR developers up in Nashua, NH, at HyTech Professionals (www.hytechpro.com) that it is by no means the ONE, the “silver bullet” that will replace all other Web 2.0 frameworks out there. Still, the practiced applications architects insist, clients just love the ability to literally see the state of a Ruby on Rails application, brainstorm where it should go from there, and implement modifications much more rapidly. Herewith some interesting examples of real-world applications the HyTech Professionals engineers created in the last few months:

For a Marseilles-based firm of independent auditors, the German branch of HyTech Professionals created a complete Web-based ERP and bookkeeping front end, as fully functional as if it was installed on end-user premises. Lookup’s initially covered French laws and accounting principles. However, the application already had Euro-zone currency conversion functionality and modules to cover laws for other nations in the trading bloc. In short, an immediately-useful and extensible Ruby on Rails application.

For a Toronto-based contact center, the company delivered MapleBU, a management, collaboration and decision-aid framework intended to replace all paper routed around the typical business office. Plentiful Javascript and AJAX modules ensured that the intranet was rich in Web 2.0 functionality.

A NewWeb CMS that allows mid-size clients to create and manage content quite apart from view options. Especially interesting is the way custom API, Ruby on Rails and Javascript are combined to maximize view flexibility.

For a private middle school in upstate New York, the Nashua office provided a Ruby on Rails utility for periodically dumping (and translating) the contents of an online encyclopedia to the library and computer lab servers. This saved the school tremendous bandwidth as students were wont to frequently look up the encyclopedia site for every subject except PE and Music.

As these few examples show, there is much one can do with Ruby on Rails architecture and functionality. I’ll illustrate more enterprising examples of RoR benefits sometime soon. Tomorrow, it’s time to dissect that acronym “LAMP”.