Ruby on Rails

On Mar 29, 2011, at 2:57 PM, Alpha Blue wrote:

> So, you have a solid idea of what you want to accomplish. You know that
> by using Ruby on Rails and the core engines/plugins that will help
> manage your project, you will save your company money, time, and have a
> full test suite in place to counter development hitches.
> Before you are able to provide a complete proposal, a manager states in
> an email:
> .. we strongly encourage the use of Microsoft IIS and using a product in
> the .NET family for the code base..
> How would you approach a rebuttal on this topic?

I'd ask a couple of questions:
(1) Why do they want to use .NET?
(2) How much extra are they willing to pay in terms of developer hours and time to market to use such technologies

I understand why managers might want to standardize on a particular stack - especially given the training and support costs of a polyglot shop. I find myself coding in Ruby, Groovy, Java, C#, ColdFusion, PHP and Scala for different projects/clients. These days my "go to" language is usually Ruby (Groovy for Java shops where I need to train up the in-house team in the new language - they often do better using Grails as they already know Spring and Hibernate). That said, it's reasonable for a manager to express a technology preference and it's also reasonable for you to ask why they want it and how much extra they're willing to pay.

I've often given two estimates to a client for developing something in (say) Rails/JRuby vs pure Java with Struts or whatever their fave framework is. Usually I get to deliver in Ruby, sometimes I compromise on Spring Roo (a RAD tool for pure Java projects), occasionally they decide to do the job in Java - at which time I usually decline the project. I just can't justify building web projects in Java at any rate. The money is nice, but the cost to your soul is irreparable :)

That said, even though I haven't coded in the .net world for years, I hear Microsoft MVC isn't as horrible as .net used to be, some people are now using git instead of TFS, and I've spoken to some very sharp people both inside and outside of Microsoft that argue F# is better than Scala in some of the ways that C# (at a pure language level) is better than Java, so if someone was willing to buy me VS and pay me to do an F# project, I'd probably give it a shot!

Best Wishes,
Peter

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