Development Blog: Viget Labs

ComputerWorld listed The Top Five Technologies You Need to Know About in ‘07 last Friday and Ruby on Rails topped the list (congrats, 37Signals).  As they put it:

Equal parts design philosophy and development environment, Rails offers developers a few key code-level advantages when constructing database-backed Web applications. One of the central tenets emphasizes using less code for application development by avoiding redundancy and following Rails conventions. This means increased performance and, ideally, decreased development times.

We agree.  We evaluated Rails for awhile (with some prodding from Ben); ramped up the whole team through training, events, hiring, and internal work; and now focus most of our new development projects on the Rails framework.  In addition to working on some large sites, we’ve recently launched a couple of smaller ones (example: funside.com) and found that even though Rails was designed more for web apps than mostly-static-content sites, it still offers advantages over a traditional LAMP (as in PHP) solution.  Hence Ben‘s talk coming up at RailsConf this year: Building and Working with Static Sites in Ruby on Rails.

With Rails, we’re able to provide better solutions to our clients faster.  We also create a more enjoyable work environment for us.  As ComputerWorld notes:

Chances are you’ve heard the term Ruby on Rails—probably from someone on your Web development team lobbying heavily to use it for some or all of your company’s Web development.

Developers love Rails because it lets them focus less on the repetitive mindless grunt work of web development and more on the elegant problem-solving part of it.  But, that’s another blog post altogether ...