Ruby: sweat name, and serious productivity from programmers and businesses!

There is a growing interest for Ruby, a programing language, particularly since the appearance of Ruby on Rails (ROR), an open source web framework which was developed a couple of years ago. Basecamp and their other solutions are the leading applications with more than 1 million users.

How can that be of interest to the managment team of a company?

When speed and innovation matter, the capacity to quickly develop applications and test them reduces time-to-market. ROR is easy to use and learn, operates with lots of objects, is easy to test. As i am not a programmer and not so familiar with the specifics of the language, check the links in this post to find out more. If you are based in France, you will find a good research and assessment of Ruby in Programmez, the February issue.

How did Eyeka go for Ruby and ROR?

The ROR experts tell me that Eyeka is one of the largest applications developed currently in Europe using Ruby to build its web and mobile solutions. As a CEO, the decision to use Ruby is most probably one of the top five strategic decisions I made in 2006. Yves Languepin, our CTO, had asked our Chicago based consultant to assess the programming solutions. Sanjay came up with Java and Ruby the latter we did not know about. Our software architect, Didier, was involved on the choice. In spite of the risks of using an unknown language, and in spite of the lack of resources, we went for Ruby. I was very keen to accelerate Time-to-Market and manage a strong evolution which I anticipate, and Sanjay was very clear and fair in the benefits that we could obtain from an unconventional choice. I also think that Yves and I were quite exited by that decision.

Challenges

At the time, in April 2006, Yves had already started to hire his team, mostly java programmers. We had to bring outside resources to train, motivate and encourage the developers, some of which were unsettled by that choice. I discussed this over lunch with Jacques Froissant, our headhunter, who immediatly wrote a post on his weblog. That led us to Sebastien, a high level Ruby developper, and later to Richard Piacentini. Richard is one of the leaders of the community in France, organizer of the conference Paris on Rails.; he also made the french adaptation of “Ruby on Rails” published by Eyrolles . With Yves, they designed and implemented training programs, progressively allowing the team to take ownership of the decision. I do think they succeeded there and the next few months will tell us if that daring choice pays off as much as i expected then.

I also recommend the ROR founders’weblog.