Hello I am preparing a number of apps for physicians, hospitals, pharmacists & other health-care providers. I began my development using php/postgresql which has been working well enough, but as my apps have grown I quickly see that I need to make some changes to make them maintainable, customizable and scalable. While there are certainly a number of improvements I can make with my php apps to improve my coding/app design (which I am actively doing) but the idea of Rails is appealing to help facilitate good code design, maintenance, testing, etc. My question is Rails appropriate for a potentially large application with eventually hundreds of concurrent users, loads and loads of data coming in and out of the database, requiring robust security? I have seen the following example Rails apps. http://wiki.rubyonrails.com/rails/show/RealWorldUsage But don''t have a good sense of how these would compare to a large healthcare IT solution. In short is Rails a good choice for my solution? Are there advantages/disadvantages that I haven''t considered? I am trying to make good planning decisions early in my small startup before I lose the ability to make changes quickly and easily. Thanks, Dewey
If PHP can handle your needs, I don''t see why Rails couldn''t. Rails and PHP scales similarly. Regards, Tomas On 8/28/05, Dewey Howell <deweyhowell-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org> wrote:> Hello > > I am preparing a number of apps for physicians, hospitals, pharmacists > & other health-care providers. I began my development using > php/postgresql which has been working well enough, but as my apps have > grown I quickly see that I need to make some changes to make them > maintainable, customizable and scalable. While there are certainly > a number of improvements I can make with my php apps to improve my > coding/app design (which I am actively doing) but the idea of Rails is > appealing to help facilitate good code design, maintenance, testing, > etc. > > My question is Rails appropriate for a potentially large application > with eventually hundreds of concurrent users, loads and loads of data > coming in and out of the database, requiring robust security? I have > seen the following example Rails apps. > > http://wiki.rubyonrails.com/rails/show/RealWorldUsage > > But don''t have a good sense of how these would compare to a large > healthcare IT solution. > In short is Rails a good choice for my solution? Are there > advantages/disadvantages that I haven''t considered? > > I am trying to make good planning decisions early in my small startup > before I lose the ability to make changes quickly and easily. > > Thanks, > Dewey > _______________________________________________ > Rails mailing list > Rails-1W37MKcQCpIf0INCOvqR/iCwEArCW2h5@public.gmane.org > http://lists.rubyonrails.org/mailman/listinfo/rails >
In my opinion, Rails is a great platform for these types of applications. I am actively trying to sell a re-write of one of our internal applications (healthcare EDI etc) to our internal stake holders. Why do I think it is a great platform? Everything about Rails promotes the correct process in software development. Testing is made easy. Code is separated into components. Etc... Every application we have where I work has some small web component, but large healthcare EDI compenents. Do a rail app for the web stuff and then build your modules for backend processing, etc. Ken
On 8/28/05, Dewey Howell <deweyhowell-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org> wrote:> Hello > > I am preparing a number of apps for physicians, hospitals, pharmacists > & other health-care providers. I began my development using > php/postgresql which has been working well enough, but as my apps have > grown I quickly see that I need to make some changes to make them > maintainable, customizable and scalable. While there are certainly > a number of improvements I can make with my php apps to improve my > coding/app design (which I am actively doing) but the idea of Rails is > appealing to help facilitate good code design, maintenance, testing, > etc. > > My question is Rails appropriate for a potentially large application > with eventually hundreds of concurrent users, loads and loads of data > coming in and out of the database, requiring robust security? I have > seen the following example Rails apps. > > http://wiki.rubyonrails.com/rails/show/RealWorldUsage > > But don''t have a good sense of how these would compare to a large > healthcare IT solution. > In short is Rails a good choice for my solution? Are there > advantages/disadvantages that I haven''t considered? > > I am trying to make good planning decisions early in my small startup > before I lose the ability to make changes quickly and easily.Rails uses the same model for scaling as livejournal, flickr, etc. See http://www.loudthinking.com/arc/000479.html Database security shouldn''t be any different in Rails than it is with any other language/framework.
> In short is Rails a good choice for my solution? Are there > advantages/disadvantages that I haven''t considered? > > I am trying to make good planning decisions early in my small startup > before I lose the ability to make changes quickly and easily.In short, if you could make it scale with PHP, you can make it scale with Rails. It follows the same principle of Shared Nothing. See more in the Deployment chapter of the Rails book or search the term on Google. We have quite a few setups that does hundreds of thousands of requests per day. One that''ll soon break a million. There''s a lot of scaling going on with Rails. -- David Heinemeier Hansson http://www.loudthinking.com -- Broadcasting Brain http://www.basecamphq.com -- Online project management http://www.backpackit.com -- Personal information manager http://www.rubyonrails.com -- Web-application framework