Ted Neward on Grails/Rails
February 3, 2008
Ted Neward does a good job of dissecting a post from Stu @ Relevance on ‘How to pick a platform’. I won’t repeat everything said in those posts - they each do a better job of representing their positions than I could. I would take exception to Ted’s comment towards the end of his post:
My advice to Jane: pick a consulting firm that doesn’t have preconceived dogma about which web framework… or language, or any other toolset… to use.
I’m not so sure about this. Firms tend to have preconceived notions about platforms because they’ve invested time in learning and becoming masters of them. I wouldn’t necessarily want a firm with no .NET experience steering me towards a .NET platform for a project because ‘objective data’ lead them that way. There has to be a bias involved in those sorts of decisions.
The trick, as I see it, is to understand that the firm has a bias going in to the relationship. This assumes that you, the consumer of the service, have some particular IT needs that need to be aligned with (if you’re a Java shop, you’ll look at Java options first before looking farther afield).
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Posted in Blogging, Development, Grails, Groovy, Java, Rails, Ruby, opensource
February 4th, 2008 at 7:21 am
Here’s the problem: if you pick a web firm with a bias (say, the excellent Refactr or Slantwise), you’re implicitly choosing your. And if “you” happen to be a hiring manager with lots of business experience but without the ability to tell the difference between a Controller and a Command Line, then “you” have arguably just made the most important decision of the project without any expertise. In that case, you would probably be better going with a firm without a pre-conceived bias, or bringing someone on board with lots of experience in many different frameworks to analyze your problem and make a technology recommendation (I, for one, would work well in that role).
On the other hand, if you (or your pocket geek) know enough to make an educated decision about the technologies to be using, then going with a shop with a bias towards that technology really is in your best interest.