Over the years, we have worked with many different technologies, frameworks and languages and we have seen that the choices you make for your project have a huge impact on the time and cost<\/strong> required to keep your applications up to date and to add new functionality rapidly and safely. We have had many new clients come to us, asking for complete rewrites of existing applications<\/strong>, not because they weren\u2019t working but because it was just too costly and slow to keep them updated which, in turn, resulted in security problems and outdated applications not able to keep up with the competition.<\/span><\/p>\n Pretty much any modern programming language\/framework can be used to develop any application. There are of course differences and some are better suited for certain tasks. Here at Intesys we, <\/span>the Ruby on Rails team<\/span><\/a>, have found that Ruby on Rails offers, not only an excellent framework that makes it easier to develop what we need<\/strong>, but also a wide range of tools that help structure your projects in a way that makes adding continuous improvements trivial.<\/span><\/p>\n In this article we would like to highlight some of the benefits of using the Rails ecosystem for your applications and what it means for your business.<\/span><\/p>\n We talked about <\/span>approaching application security<\/span><\/a> in a previous article but it\u2019s relevant here as well. Before you can start thinking about adding new exciting features to keep your application evolving, you need to make sure that it\u2019s secure. Nothing can hurt your reputation like leaked user data or extensive service downtime<\/strong>.<\/span><\/p>\n You would be surprised to know how many large, important applications there are out there running on outdated operating systems without important security patches<\/strong> or on older versions of languages\/frameworks\/libraries with known security problems. It\u2019s one of those things like when you only order certain things when eating out since that one summer job in a restaurant kitchen many years ago\u2026 When you get insight into the \u201cbehind the scenes\u201d of software development you realize that quality and security is only as good as the competence and integrity of the developers behind it.<\/span><\/p>\n In order to make it easier to \u201cdo the right thing\u201d we have chosen Rails, that\u00a0gives us a series of tools aimed at solving these problems.<\/span><\/p>\n In Ruby on Rails you specify external dependencies in a file, giving the name of the library and, optionally, a version number. The convention of the Rails community is to use semantic versioning<\/strong><\/a> which, when used correctly, allows you to apply only compatible updates. You can use this for relatively safe day to day updates<\/strong> and when major releases (with changes that might break backwards compatibility) come out, you know that you need to be careful and make sure that they don\u2019t break anything in your application. In order to make sure of this, another common practice in the Rails community is to utilize Test Driven Development or TDD for short.<\/span><\/p>\nMaintenance and Security<\/span><\/h2>\n
Gems and Semantic Versioning<\/span><\/h2>\n
Test Driven Development (TDD)<\/span><\/h2>\n