Coding in Ruby on Rails

At present, the vast majority of our work is done in Ruby on Rails; either from scratch or built upon Radiant (a content management system) or Spree (an ecommerce framework). We use Rails because we believe that it is the best tool around for building database-driven web-sites; it encourages you to structure your code well and it makes automated testing easy.

We’ve also been involved in releasing code for use by others - normally under the MIT Open Source licence. This is because we use a lot of open source ourselves so it’s only right that we give something back; software is built standing on the shoulders of giants - sharing helps to repay that debt.

Some examples of the open source code that Rahoul’s been involved in:

Eventable

A Radiant extension that adds an activity page to your administration section. With one line of code you can record a note every time that someone makes a change on your site and this is shown as a feed within your site (viewable by your staff only).

Rujitsu

A ruby gem that adds a number of convenience and helper methods to make development that bit smoother.

Object Factory

3hv is obsessed with automated testing - and Object Factory makes it simple to seed test data specific to each individual feature, so you can be sure that it’s working as expected.

Bigwig

Bigwig is a specialist piece of software that listens for messages from an AMQP queue (which is an ultra-reliable messaging system) and routes the message to the relevant destination.

Is it Ruby 1.9?