Distributed Programming with Ruby

Chapter 5 Distribunaut

In early 2008, I was working for a company that was using Ruby on Rails as the framework behind the application we were building. For the most part we were happy with Rails, but there were things we wanted to do that Rails was just not a good fit for. First we realized that what had started as a Web 2.0 application was anything but that. Instead, we came to the conclusion that we were building a rather large portal application.

For all of its pros, Rails has a few cons as well. I won’t go into all of them now, but the biggest disadvantage we found was that Rails doesn’t want to help you write complex portal applications. It wants you to build smaller, simpler applications—at least, at the time it did. With Rails 3.0 on ...