This is one thing I like about Ruby on Rails. there seems to be no planning about writing software using Rails. Wen I read my first Rails book named Agile Web Development with Rails, it said that what the customer says he wants and what he wants and what we end up with will be rally different.  Just like chaos causes universal events to have varied results. And rails is just suited for that environment.

I have written web software for more than 5 years in my company Mind As Lab and what I like about Rails is that there is no need to plan about any thing. We can just code, its because of the fact that Ruby programming language and Rails is very agile and helps programmers to change the software as they wish.

I am not saying that PHP is dead, it won’t be for a long long time. Those who jump in new to web application development can start with PHP. Its a free software and great language and is still supported by many hosting providers than any other programming language. But Rails is Concorde, you need to put in extra effort to learn to fly it, but when you do, you do go at twice the speed of sound.

When I coded with PHP, I needed an array of programmers, each assigned a  particular module, they would need to code that module assuming others will do their coding part as I had planned exactly. The entire software must be documented and it must distributed to all so that communication problem will be minimized. Being in India’s where people know half baked English, and in a education system that has thought people to memorize and vomit it on exam papers to get marks, we did have lot of problems. I did have to bang my head time to time, cursing me and others.

With Rails, when i do find a problem, I can just fix it. We already have 2 commercial grade products. There is no need to wait for developers. The developer simply knows where I might have changed the code since rails is structured.

With Rails I just have 3 people to code software. I am the software architect who interacts with clients and lay out how the software should be. another guy is a Rails developer and the third one is the designer who adds beautiful skin to software. managing less populated team is like breeze.

I wish project managers who are using PHP and other programming languages to code web applications to concentrate on Rails. We just work 3 to 5 hours a day and achieve the same result of coding 8 to 10 hours using PHP. My developers I hope, don’t feel work pressure.

I also take this opportunity to thank free software and Ruby on Rails community to have made Mind As Lab as a success story.