Topic: BBC and Ruby on Rails (Page 1 of 1)

The BBC have just launched a catalogue site built on back of ROR...

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Within incredibly tight timescales and large technical constraints, our BBC team performed a feat in taking a home-grown catalogue of all the BBC's programmes since the 1920s public (over 900,000 entries!) and launching http://catalogue.bbc.co.uk/catalogue/infax. The catalogue database was written in Ruby on Rails, a platform that has, until recently, invited cynicism from the technical community at large with regards to its scalability. The team have made it robust enough for public consumption, and have increased performance well above the BBC's requirements.

The catalogue is not comprehensive and the programmes themselves are not included for streaming or downloading. It's currently a research tool to guide visitors to the content catalogued by the BBC in its long history, though they have aspirations to make some of their archive programmes available in the future. Have a play!

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Another finger up at the nay sayers with Twitter and Yellow pages (USA) already proving that Rails has scalability it's good to see other organisations now taking it seriously and reaping the benefits of agile development and swift deployment.

FYI: The company I'm at worked on the Rails for this project and deployed it.

Cheers,

beta

Geeeez... here I was all excited but couldn't for the life of me figure out how to hear or see any of the stuff I searched. And then I ran across this.

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The programmes themselves are not included for streaming or downloading.

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I'll accept that this is a good example of putting ROR to the test but that little disclaimer should be emblazoned on the front page for all to see.

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"Capitalism hears all prayers...." Lore Sjöberg

OK...I'm gonna play the bad guy here. (Not that the other 2 comments were great ) I am glad that they came out with this but...

What is the big deal about it that Ruby on Rails did that something like PHP couldn't have done? I was trying to get Ruby installed on my linux computer at home and had all kinds of issues with it and Apache and blah blah blah. I just gave up and moved on to something else. I don't need to confuse myself with another language like I am already.

Later,

C:\

RoR is a full stack framework
* ORM is baked in
* Testing (unit, functional, integration) is baked in
* Debugging is baked in
* MVC is baked in
* Routing is baked in
* Web services are baked in
* Code auto generation is baked in
* Database migrations (forward and backwards) are baked in

I am most likely missing a lot there.

The other big thing about RoR is that it is making in roads for enterprise level deployments. This is an area that is pretty tied up in .NET and Java development. Having another contender in there that is a full stack framework is pretty nice.

The other benefits about RoR is that it is written in Ruby. Ruby is an excellent language. You might find it very similar to python. It is completely object oriented and has syntax that allow you to do incredibly complex things, as well as to make normal things very intuitive.

It is not all yellow brick roads. There are problems, and it is a platform that is evolving incredibly fast without a lot of backwards computability. Just because something worked in a previous release does not mean it will work the same way in a future release.

It is a framework of conventions, and if you are not following them things can be difficult. It is not a language of configurations which if you are a Java developer you will know all too well.

I still find PHP to be the language that I will use for developing a small brochure-ware site. I know PHP too well, and I can throw my templates together in minutes, and if I do not need a database driven back end I will most likely not gain a whole lot of benefit from an MVC structure.

If I am going to be developing something larger I am going to go with RoR. It just feels smarter when I am doing it.

Dan
Code Town | Zombie Head | How Much TP?