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Ruby on Rails Keynote at RailsConf

by tkeller on September 03, 2007

Our founder and UK President, Jonathan Siegel, is set to deliver the keynote address at RailsConf in Berlin this month. Yahoo news reports:

BERLIN--(BUSINESS WIRE)--At the RailsConf Europe, scheduled to be held here September 17-19, Jonathan Siegel, founder and UK President of ELC Technologies, will deliver a keynote presentation entitled "Beyond Startup: Rails Demand in the Global 2000." The keynote will highlight the rapidly growing acceptance of the Ruby on Rails open web development framework for enterprise applications, and offer strategies for Rails developers to commercialize their development efforts.

Siegel and the development team at ELC Technologies have been developing commercial applications using Ruby on Rails for such clients as MediaTrust, Buy.com, Cisco Systems, and LiveNation for some time. Drawing from their experience, Siegel will share what he has learned about the increasing value of Ruby on Rails as a commercial development platform. Siegel will discuss the business case for Ruby on Rails in business-critical web and enterprise applications, and how such revelations will affect the future of Ruby on Rails. He also will review the trade-offs of using Rails as opposed to Java, .NET, or other development platforms, how to mitigate risks, and where Ruby outperforms other platforms and where it falls short.

"The demand for Ruby on Rails in business-critical applications is influencing the development of Rails itself," Siegel said. "At ELC Technologies, we have witnessed this firsthand during the development of a number of highly successful client deployments. Ruby on Rails is transitioning from a .NET and Java replacement, to an integrative framework that deploys seamlessly onto existing .NET or Java deployment infrastructures. Leveraging existing .NET/Java libraries and know-how marks a key milestone that demonstrates Ruby on Rails' maturity as a commercial framework. At RailsConf Europe, we expect to see a continued uptake of Rails for commercial applications on a global scale - the benefits are just too great to ignore."

Ruby on Rails is gaining popularity with Global 2000 companies because it significantly shortens development time, and requires fewer developers to write and maintain applications. Ruby code tends to be significantly lighter and less complex than other commercial web languages, making it significantly easier to debug and maintain.

For example, Joseph Mattheny, CTO of MediaTrust, Inc., noted, "After investing 18 months and a large budget into a .NET deployment, we decided to pull the plug after seeing the rapid progress made by our Ruby on Rails team. We have migrated or plan to migrate 70 percent of our web technology to the Rails platform."