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The Power of Ruby on Rails

[3] Responses Posted by Solo Hike, 01/21/08

Fast Moving Vehicles

One of my recent development experiences sums up the power of Ruby on Rails.

After a year of using Ruby on Rails for a variety of projects, I recently provided a client with a Web based solution in an unbelievable four hours.

I had been consulting for a logistics and transportation company operating in fairly inaccessible regions of Central Asia when I was given the task of identifying inefficient aspects of the company workflow, and then developing a solution to attain greater efficiency based on my study.

I was quickly able to identify three main areas where greater efficiency and integrity could be realized within the company’s workflow:

  1. Vehicle dispatching, logging and tracking
  2. Daily, weekly and monthly reporting
  3. Client communication

Anyone who has ever operated a business in remote parts of Central Asia is aware of the numerous logistic hurdles beyond the ordinary challenges faced by most businesses day to day. It is especially challenging to operate a transportation company in parts of Central Asia with a history of conflict, due to the problematic state of the roads and unique security issues. Within this environment the company desperately needed to upgrade their existing system and workflow, and had little time to do so. Therefore the time frame allowed for getting “product to market” was extremely short.

After making an initial assessment of the company’s capabilities and needs, I determined that a database driven secure Web application with online and off-line functionality would be the required solution to the company’s many challenges.

I made my decision based on three factors:

  1. The company was rapidly becoming decentralized and the company needed to move away from a single dispatcher based system.
  2. As a result of becoming decentralized, the company also required a system which was secure, ensuring the personal safety of both customers and drivers alike. Allowing only authorized employees access to travel records was a top priority.
  3. While Internet connectivity is reliable at the company’s offices (due to being satellite based), electricity is not. Internet connectivity therefore could not be guaranteed at an uptime of 99% or greater without the use of costly batteries, and because of that factor, offline execution was a main requirement for the new application.

I decided upon a new approach to my first meeting with the client since I had very little time to assess their needs and devise a solution: I decided to build the Web application *during* the initial brainstorming session itself. Over the course of a four hour meeting at the client’s office I developed a Web application on a Macintosh laptop running Ruby on Rails with ActiveScaffold, MySQL and Google Gears (for offline capability). The results were astonishing. By the end of the meeting we had a complete Web application installed on a production server ready to use with their day to day operations.

What made the blistering speed of development possible was mostly due to ActiveScaffold, a Rails plugin that I will write more about in future posts. Rails by it’s nature is already extremely fast and efficient for the type of development this project called for, however I would estimate that by using ActiveScaffold the development time was cut by an additional 90% compared to if I had built the application without ActiveScaffold.

Simply put, the power of Ruby on Rails.