our blog

With all the hype going out there for Google Docs & Spreadsheet online applications, and how the real-time online editing & service-as-software movement (which we definitely love!) I have just one small question to all business users & companies considering using Google Docs, Spreadsheet, Calendar etc.

Would you like your business plan to be indexed by Google? Your financial statement / report? Your private or business sensitive data? hmm…

The thing about Google on-line apps, is that although it is revolutionary, extremely useful and just simply great, its still… Google. And that means you don’t control your data anymore - they do. Your files are on their servers, your data is indexed by their bots. But, your will say, they don’t appear in search results! So what? If its not on your computer - do you really control it anymore? With some kiddie or private docs its no problem -  but I’m sure many businesses will have serious headache figuring out just how secure their on-line documents really are.

Solution? Quite simple I think. Office 2.0? Software as service? YES! But keep your sensitive data off-line on your computer, or at least on some private, secure storage online. Its secure only if you control and own it. Just like you don’t put all eggs in once basket when it comes to business decisions, in exactly the same way its somehow strange to let one company handle everything about your online presence - search, office apps, data storage… its just too much to feel secure anymore!

RubyOnRails has got its momentum - that’s for sure. Hundreds of developers worldwide are screaming about beauty of ROR. About how great and ideal this neat framework is. How MVC it is. How Web 2.0 it is (”if you don’t use RubyOnRails you’re not really web 2.0″ - huh?). And of course (!) about how shitty and messy and (%just put some random bad words here%) other frameworks and programming languages are.

But how much of it is marketing hype, and how many of those are hard cold facts? There’s a never-ending battle “ruby vs. rest of the world” going on out there, and we don’t want to add our bits to it. We agree RubyOnRails IS very nice framework. It DOES have some extremely interesting programming ideas and solution built in. But is it SO damn good to abandon every other web programming language like Java or PHP? We seriously doubt it.

We think that for some people, Ruby really IS the programming language of choice. But for majority of people (usually those with the loudest voice ) Ruby isn’t really about best programming techniques. Its about grass being greener somewhere else. Its about wild west where everything is so fresh, and so colorful - until after few years… its not so colorful anymore

Why? Because however great RubyOnRails wouldn’t be - its still just a framework. And in truth, you can do EVERYTHING - every single thing - that is there in RubyOnRails on any other web development platform like PHP or Java. It’s not about programming language guys. Its about software engineering. Its about how well can you organize your code - not which fancy shirts do you wear this season.

Take a look at this story - we seriously think, its just the beginning of RubyOnRails “recession”. Something which might be “live or die” experience for the whole RubyOnRails community.