Ruby railroad/Rails comparison

September 10, 2006

An acquaintance from the local meetup.com scene, Nathaniel Talbott, made a very interesting analogy between ‘Rails’ (the Ruby platform) and ‘rails’ as in the railroad industry of the 1800s.  His article is here, although I can’t find a specific date on it.  Regardless of date, it’s certainly got some good insight into not just Ruby, but software development in general.  One of the pieces on techcrunch I was reading recently indicated that ‘DIY’ software will be becoming a bigger trend in the coming years, and I think that dovetails with Nathaniel’s points about both users and developers wanting more control over their software.

Back when I worked at Quicken Loans, we used Intuit’s Quickbase product for a lot of internal apps.  This was a way for many small departments to ‘get control’ over their software, to the extent that they could make small, simple web-based apps to collect data.  Most were not that big - many were survey and feedback form type apps.  While it was a great way to give some control, I always wondered how many companies would be comfortable allowing their HR data to be shared across the public internet.  The larger the company, the bigger the security risk would be relative to the benefit of quick, ad-hoc reports being created.  Given the security landscape, I think public hosted apps like Quickbase may have a harder time  holding their own against  versions that can be hosted in house.  Whether these are bespoke apps written inhouse or done by external consultants, or developed on an internal platform like MS Sharepoint, externally hosted apps will have some limited adoption rates as they try to sell to larger companies.  An interesting question would be ‘do smaller companies reconsider their security and reliance on outside vendors and retool with inhouse tools as they grow bigger?’  Do the SarbOx rules make people think twice about what can and can’t be hosted externally?

Posted in Business, Development, Ideas, Microsoft, Ruby, linux, opensource