One of the more interesting articles I’ve seen in relation to Rails Rumble analysed the prevalence of various plug-ins and gems that teams utilised.

After a quick look there are a few points that specifically interest me :

• jQuery is the most used Javascript library, even though it isn’t the default included with Rails. I think this says a lot about where jQuery fits in the client side coding space these days. Under further scrutiny it seems clear that jQuery had an even larger base of use than shown in that graph, as explained here.
• 1 in 3 teams used a skeleton application. All of those teams used Bort. That’s a pretty overwhelming statistic for two reasons. Firstly it means you should be looking at using skeleton applications if you aren’t already. Secondly anything that you develop that could be used in other applications should possibly be a gem or plug-in. Reuse doesn’t seem to be something you just talk about anymore.
• Over 50% of people wrote tests as part of their application, and the majority of people used a Behaviour Driven Development framework such as Shoulda or rSpec (they got rSpec!). Keep in mind that even on a tight schedule most people using Rails are writing tests!
• Over a third of applications offered OpenID support for authentication. Given I don’t even remember where I signed up for OpenID this surprises me. Maybe it’s time to join this bandwagon?

I think the article gives a good indicator where you should look to implement certain parts of your application. Generally speaking, if a lot of passionate developers are using a particular library or piece of code then you’d be wise to make the same choice.

Taking an application from inception to release inside 48 hours is a laughable proposition to most but this year that’s exactly what a number of people did using Ruby on Rails. It’s an annual event these days called Rails Rumble where teams get together for a weekend and plan, develop and deploy their ideas as applications. The main rules are that it’s developed in it’s entirety onsite, inside the 48 hour period and is done in Ruby on Rails. Teams are small with four being the upper limit allowed.

A list of applications by category was posted here and to be honest there are some truly great ideas. The websites range from comical to serious in style and meet the needs of people, persons and businesses in a wide variety of areas.

Winners that I’ve checked out are :

WantNom – fun site aimed at making getting your friends together for dinner simpler.

Redminutes – a pretty basic site, but the idea is about making collaboration on small notes much simpler.

Couldya – basically using social networking to ask people to do things and track how the task is going. It’s an example of what I think is a reasonable idea that has a lot of implementation to go.

HikedIt – a social networking site dedicated to people that hike and get around outside. It looks very polished and I have a friend who’s been talking about a site kind of like this for ages. Done in 48 hours.

That’s just four of the apparently 200+ applications that were developed to some extent, whether partially or completely finished.

I think the main thing to see here is that all of these applications were developed inside 48 hours by up to four people and to be honest the ones I’ve clicked around that interested me were all more than useable and solved a problem I wanted solved. Could you do this with other languages? Perhaps, but having used a few frameworks myself (ASP, ASP.NET, PHP, Rails) I don’t think any of them come close for rapid development like this.

It makes me excited that we have rolled out a major application recently using Ruby on Rails and that there are still parts of the industry that are fun right now.