Need help writing about Rails in magazine article

Hi. I’m trying to write about Rails for this magazine article. How
does it look so far? I’m trying to explain it to the average man - NOT
the developer.

“Rails is a system which drastically simplifies web applications - by
letting one develop using Ruby [1], by having a more reasonable way of
organizing things [2], and by automating a lot more [3]. Rails also
opens the door for failsafe applications by writing tests and then
making sure the application passes these tests [4]”

[1] Perl, Lisp and Smalltalk. [2] In conjunction with semantic, W3-
verified HTML and CSS, and JavaScript via jQuery. [3] I.e. database
management. [5] Behavior Driven Development via Cucumber.

Anything I should add, rephrase or take away? Especially [3], is there
anything I could add there?

Thanks!

“Rails is a system”

should be “Rails is a framework (a set of libraries and tools)”

“and by automating a lot more”

is not the right reason, i think standardizing is.

"by letting one develop using only Ruby "

as the advantage is that in many cases you dont need to write sql or
javascript code and that is the advantage.

"Rails also opens encourages failsafe applications by having build in
support to automatically tests the application and then
making sure the application passes these tests “”

testing is not unique to rails, but rails has testing build in and is
the
best. Also a reader may not not what testing is the may confuse it with
manual testing

Well this are my suggestions

“Rails is a framework (a set of libraries and tools) which drastically
simplify web applications development - by
letting one develop using only Ruby [1], by having a standard way of
organizing things [2], which allows automating a lot more [3]. Rails
also
encourages failsafe applications by having build in support to
automatically
tests the application and then
making sure the application passes these tests [4]”

Thanks a lot man - this sure was helpful :slight_smile:

But to the rest of y’all - please feel free to chip in with your two
cents
as well!

Tony

Hi Tony,

On Sat, Nov 6, 2010 at 6:33 AM, Tony M. [email protected]
wrote:

[1] Perl, Lisp and Smalltalk. [2] In conjunction with semantic, W3-
verified HTML and CSS, and JavaScript via jQuery. [3] I.e. database
management. [5] Behavior Driven Development via Cucumber.

Anything I should add, rephrase or take away? Especially [3], is there
anything I could add there?

I’d start by trying to define the things this ‘average man’ cares
about and then talk about those things. I don’t see anything above
that would have meaning / value for anyone but a developer. You
might want to start with something like cost.

Best regards,
Bill

On Sat, Nov 6, 2010 at 8:15 AM, Bill W. [email protected]
wrote:

organizing things [2], and by automating a lot more [3]. Rails also
I’d start by trying to define the things this ‘average man’ cares
about and then talk about those things. I don’t see anything above
that would have meaning / value for anyone but a developer. You
might want to start with something like cost.

Also speed to market - which for me is not just speed to deploy, but
speed
to deploy (a) with high level of quality (b) what the client/public
actually
wants and is usable.

But cost is big also - for one of my clients I easily outperform their
dev
staff of 4 .NET developers (who are doing waterfall method and
automated-test-less development, who also insist on not using ORM layers
and
other things which Rails contains — not that .NET dev could not be
done
better than this, but just an example which might be relatively common,
especially to companies who are run by non-IT/Dev savvy/focused
managers).

Best regards,

On Sat, Nov 6, 2010 at 12:19 PM, Tony M. [email protected]
wrote:

But it costs just as much to hire a Rails developer as it does to hire a
.NET developer right?

Money doesn’t really matter to my investors though. I just want to explain
what Rails is to them and why it’s so cool (for the Technology section of my
business plan).

read what daved said 1 rails developert will outperform 4 .Net developer
and
i have seen that.

But it costs just as much to hire a Rails developer as it does to hire a
.NET developer right?

Money doesn’t really matter to my investors though. I just want to
explain
what Rails is to them and why it’s so cool (for the Technology section
of my
business plan).

Thanks!