Enterprise Rails

Preface

It would be quite unusual for a person not trained as a surgeon to walk into a hospital operating room, ask a nurse for a scalpel, and start cutting. However, anyone—even those without computer science degrees—can walk into a bookstore, pick up a programming book, and start programming that afternoon. To build a website, you once needed to be adept in a number of languages and technologies: SQL, HTML, JavaScript, and of course, the language du jour for the application itself. But with Ruby on Rails, the bar seems to have dropped almost through the floor. You can learn only Rails, and the development of the database, HTML, and JavaScript layers are waved away by the Rails magic.

It’s an excellent sales pitch for Rails, but is it true?

As much as we might like it to be, the sad truth is that if your goal is to design high-performance scalable websites, there is still much to be learned beyond the syntax of a programming language. Nothing comes for free. Of course, this argument for the need for thorough training in software engineering principles applies to all languages equally. But does using Ruby on Rails rather than some other application language and framework significantly reduce the topics you need to master to be a great application developer?

Sadly, the answer is still no. Throughout the history of web development, the constants have been SQL, HTML, and JavaScript. It’s the language du jour that keeps changing, well, seemingly daily. Is it possible that a Johnny-come-lately ...