And it has paid dividends.   At first, what would have taken me a few days to implement in PHP took a few weeks in Rails because I was figuring out how Rails worked, learning the “Rails Way” and discovering plugins.   Now a last minute feature addition that was dubbed critical was accomplished in less than an hour including testing and deployment.   The same feature would have taken at least 2 days in PHP based on how I used to develop.

All this to say, the Red Zone is a product that I’m very proud of.   It is well designed from the inside out.   There are some look and feel components that I’d like to improve on, but overall, the UI has been thought through so that the user gets maximum ease of use.  The user security schema has been thought through so that it works with how the users actually use it. The administration has been ‘DRY’d up so that changes only need to be made in one place, not 15–which makes for a very pleasant and consistent user experience.

The biggest advantage to using Rails has definitely been speed of development (and fun!), but the biggest pitfall has been speed of use.   When you compare it to other platforms, though, Rails just ends up succumbing to the same problems they have : when you deal with a lot of data, you’re going to be slow unless you know how to optimize it.

We did optimize it by putting all of our data into what is called a denormalized table. This allowed us to grab all the data needed without any complicated or expensive joins in the database.   Now you can pull a full months report in seconds rather than minutes, allowing our staff to spend time doing what they do well, rather than waiting on a web page to load.

We also added other features that took a fraction of the time to develop like moving our lead tracking system into the Red Zone and simplifying some internal processes.

All in all, it’s been a pleasure to work with Ruby on Rails to develop this business product for Red McCombs Media.  I’d recommend using Rails to nearly any company that wants to develop a feature rich product and knows how to properly optimize code.