Solving Your Business Problems Fast with Ruby on Rails

Tim Hoolihan, CTOStone Crossing Solutions

Rails Place in the World

What is Ruby / Rails

• What is Ruby? – Ruby-lang.org

• What is Rails?– RubyOnRails.org

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The Obvious

• Startups / Green Field Applications– Rapid Application– Lots of Built-in Functionality (ORM, Validation, etc)– Friendly Framework for Designers to Integrate in the Project– No Licensing Cost

4

What About Enterprise Settings?

• Doesn’t the Enterprise Want Rapid Application Development too?– Convention over Configuration– Rails: Ruby as a Web DSL

• Flexible Language– Rails and Gems provide a lot out of the box

– http://docs.rubygems.org/

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Enterprise continued

• Integration– Rails is a Friendly Sources for Middleware or ETL

• Easy to Expose Database, Web Services (XML, JSON)– Rails can consume Web Services

• For Realtime integration, Rails can call your exposed Service APIs

6

Enterprise continued

• Integration Continued– Batch Integration

• Most companies have ETL or Middleware tools that solve integration (non-realtime)

– MySQL or Postgres are the most common for Rails, but Rails can work with a variety of Database vendors:

• SQL Server• Oracle• DB2 and more

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Enterprise continued

• Rails encourages Web Standards– Helps Cross Browser Support– Helps Mobile Support

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Enterprise Practices

• These aspects of Rails aren’t often touted, but they fit right in with larger environments– ActiveRecord (ORM) supports Transactions– ActiveRecord supports Optimistic Concurrency– ActiveRecord supports distributed Caching– Rails supports centralized session server

• Scales Horizontally very well

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Summary

• No tool is a fit in every scenario, but Rails certainly is a good choice for more than just startups and prototypes.

• What business applications are you considering for Rails? Submit a question now and we’ll discuss it during Q&A.

Next – Josh Schramm will do a demonstration of the speed and ease of Ruby.

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Ruby on Rails Live Demo

Building a basic inventory management application

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Stone Supply Requirements

• Web Application• An employee can add a new product• An employee can enter the quantity on hand of a product• An employee can update the quantity when an item is sold• An employee can see a reorder quantity to know when to order

more

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Joe FioriniLean Dog

Ruby – Real Examples

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