Rails Application featured on Good Morning America
Posted by marcel February 15, 2007 @ 04:52 AM
Former AOL CEO Steve Case recently appeared on Good Morning America to talk about his new venture Revolution Health, a new health site built on Rails. Think next generation WebMD.
The Revolution Health team has been blogging their progress over at Revolution On Rails. InfoQ recently conducted an interview with the developers that discusses, among other things, their PluGems (it’s a plugin! it’s a gem!!) approach to sharing code across the multiple applications that make up Revolution Health.
You need to add a www to the link to get it working. That’s a pretty big lapse for a major site launch…
Jon,
You are a liar, you lying liar.
he’s not!
DailyKos announced yesterday (Feb. 14) that their website will be re-engineered using Ruby on Rails. That’s a pretty big announcement.
here’s the permalink re dailykos:
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/2/14/184757/416
At Achieve Internet, I have been working on Lime.com, which is part of Steve Case’s Revolution Living. When we took on the development of the site, it was in perl mason, but before perl it was also in Rails. We ended up moving the site over to the Drupal platform, but apparently there is an affinity for Rails over there at revolution.
I’m surprised people can move from Rails to a PHP based system (drupal). I have been using Drupal for a venture I started with a buddy over 18 months back. Sadly, it is very high maintenance because a)Drupal has a high propensity to break everytime there is a mySQL or PHP upgrade. Even a new Drupal patch broke us if we were not on the right PHP/mySQL combo.
b)PHP code has SQL all over the place.
c) To make Drupal useful, we needed to use a large number of Drupal plugins – some of which we has customized. The plugins mire one deeper into the maintenance swamp as their original owners can’t be relied on to fix bugs or keep with Drupal releases and their PHP code has minimal adherence to standards.
I tend to agree with you about Drupal. However, we didn’t move to Drupal from rails, but rather moved to Drupal from Perl Mason. It was another team that moved from Rails to Perl Mason, and that seems like an even stranger move. If I was building something from scratch, rails seems like the way to go. If you need to build a highly complex CMS in two months, Drupal and the large body of modules can provide a rich feature set, with a small amount of customization. However, as a platform, Drupal’s purely functional model leaves something to be desired. I would love to see some highly extensible CMS’s built in rails. I am sure so great open source rails CMS’s will start to evolve and mature over the next few years.
I also agree re: Drupal. Joomla is also similarly messy, but nothing can put a full CMS together in a short ammount of time and effort like Joomla or Drupal.