Over the past eighteen months, we’ve built more and more of our projects in ruby frameworks (rails, merb, and sinatra). It’s been hugely exciting for our coding team – new technology, new tricks to learn, and the whole ‘geek-cachet’ of being on the bleeding-edge.

And, whilst a change in the technologies underpinning  our sites normally elicits a disinterested ‘meh’ from those of us with ’softer skills’, our UI, design and SEO staff are hugely excited about the move as well.

So, what makes a non-programmer excited about a programming language and its associated frameworks. It’s not that it’s a ‘miracle tool’ for non-programmers – Rob still spends half his working day rolling his eyes as I ask (for the 25th time) how to add a ‘foreach’ loop in Ruby. What’s revolutionary is the way it enables us all to work closely together on a project and deliver a much more holistic and integrated solution to the client. (It’s also no bad thing that it has also slashed the time it takes for us to develop complex web applications).

To be fair it’s not all down to Ruby alone, but also the simultaneous adoption of an MVC (Model, View, Controller) workflow and ‘git’. MVC isn’t unique to Ruby frameworks, but it is much easier to incorporate than it would be with a PHP-based workflow (yes we know about Cake). Git is a robust versioning control system that leaves SVN for dead. In adopting MVC and ‘git’ we have effectively separated the work Simon (Major Model), Rob (Captain Control) and myself (Vice-admiral  View) do on a project.

Pre-Ruby, we used to design a site’s look and feel and then code it (mostly to stop designers and programmers cursing each other as the latest version of a template got overwritten for the fifteenth time). Now that we’re all able to work on a site at the same time without tripping over each-other’s ‘virtual toes’, we’re actually finding more time to talk to one another, brainstorm on the job, and refine the shape a project as we go along.

The end-results is that we are much more agile in how we build sites and applications. It’s effectively one giant ‘mix-in’ with ideas bouncing round at a million miles an hour and new features being discussed, prototyped and rolled out in hours. And the client benefit is huge (at least for those clients that ‘get’ the whole agile methodology). They’re benefitting from a cross-disciplinary team working together and building in great features that weren’t even the scope (and for for no additional charge at that). How could it be any better?

Talk to us to see what ‘agile’ can do for you.

I guess it’s true for a lot of businesses, but it’s a sad fact that the busier we are (and the more we have to tell you about) – the less time we get to add blog entries.

We’ve just finished up a couple of big new sites, My Wish Wand and Complete Models and effects in Merb.

Geeks like Merb because it’s an “agile, platform agnostic MVC framework that plays nicely with Ruby” (as Simon and Rob will explain in altogether too much detail if I ever let them out of the back room). But developing sites in Merb also results in huge benefits for our clients.Using Merb drives costs down and slashes development timescales.   So how does it do this? (And why should you care?).

A lot of it comes from the MVC approach used by Merb. MVC stands for Model (the end-user data we’re interested in using on the sites), View (how the data should be displayed) and Control (the actions we perform on both). This means that Simon (Mr. Model), myself (Mr. View) and Robert (Mr. Controller), can all work simultaneously on a section of a site without constantly getting in each other’s way or (thanks to our recent adoption of Git) overwriting each other’s files.

Merb is also much leaner and more flexible than Ruby on Rails (our previous MVC framework of choice). Merb 1.0 has only been out a couple of weeks, so it hasn’t hit the mainstream web design community yet. This gives us (and our clients) a real competitive edge.

It really is Merbaceous!