Hello Ruby users,
let me introduce myself briefly - I am a student at OvG University
Magdeburg, Germany, and I hope to get some advice for a nonprofit
student community portal I am involved with, just in case somebody is
interested: http://www.webuni.de, having around 3000 active users.
Development is done on a voluntary basis by members of the community,
mainly IT students with too much spare time.
At present, the code base is in Php - it’s huge, and nearly
unmaintainable. There are 120 reported unfixed bugs, and as it’s really
bad coding style - mixing presentation, SQL and PHP code - fixing bugs
has become close to impossible.
We decided to move away from Php.
Java is popular at our university, and everybody is familiar with it. At
first I proposed to use a java solution based on Hibernate, Tapestry and
Spring/Acegi security. I have experience using these frameworks, but I’m
not too convinced other junior developers will be able or willing to
learn them, too. Also a java solution might be overkill, since it will
always stay a regional community, mainly focused on the city and student
life of Magdeburg, so performance is not the main issue.
Now that’s where Ruby on Rails comes in - as I read about rails, I
thought this might be a way for us to go. I have read “Agile web
development with Rails” and “Programming Ruby 2nd Edition”, but have no
further practical Ruby experience.
Are there any experiences with using Ruby on Rails for a community
portal? Maybe some experienced users could give some hints on where the
advantages of Ruby and Rails are for this case.
One thing I imagined was, that developing application pieces - we call
them “modules” - will be easier to implement since Ruby gives something
like built-in static crosscutting through mix-ins.
Are there any experiences with unexperienced Java developers using Ruby?
Or is it just a matter of taste, and I’m better off with sticking to the
Java solution?
Best regards
Gregor M.