One of the main reason many developers choose Rails is its promise of increased productivity.  As many people in the rails community claim “It is the fastest way of going from and idea to implementation“.   I have seen anecdotal references to Rails vs. java OR Rails vs. PHP coomparision claiming Rails applications to be 3-5 times faster development time.And there are numerous screencasts and blogs that show you how to develop a database application from start to finish in an hour (or a day) with few lines of actual code logic.

For small to medium complexity applications involving less than 10 developers and loose processes (requirement analysis, design specifications , documentation, etc.) this may be true.

But can you really extrapolate this level of productivity to a large project involving multipe teams and highly complex requirements for scalability, performance and enterprise integration ? We were abou to find out…

Rails like many of its  open-source predecessors such as Java and PHP is going through a chaotic phase of rapid innovation and accelerated growth in terms of ideas, features and implementation strategies.  We witnessed similar growing pains with Java during its early years between 1996 – 2000.  New versions and patches of core java libraries kept coming at you faster than you can say “WTF”.   No one really cared about such things as “backward compatibility” OR “continuity”.  Upgrading to a new version meant rewriting many lines of code and re-testing the whole application.

Fast forward to 2009, we have many more channels for distributing and finding information about Rails. Beyond 100s of books and websites, we now have  numerous  blogs, forums, feeds, facebook, twitter and other social networking and search engines that are a “click” away from getting us the information we need.  Obviously not every blog, forum and facebook page can keep up with the current status of Rails and many of its off-shoots (gems, engines, plugins, etc.)

Unless you are part of the Rails core team OR somehow wired into the internal development of Rails, it is extremly difficult to find right answers to your questions.

The code compatibility paradox

One of the frustrating aspect of developing with Rails is knowing if a particular gem, engine or plugin is compatible with the version of Rails you are using. Most of the plugin repositories (gitHub, agilewebdevelopment.com) don’t always provide information about the version compatibility.  Rails has not yet evolvled to a point where we can establish an independent certification body (open-source OR commercial) who can provider a seal of approval for compatibility for Rails versions with a myriad of gems, plugins and application code.

Here  is an opportunity for a budding entrepreneur to  provide such a service.

I should point out that this is not unique to Rails. Java went throuh the same problems in its early years. The end result is that developers spend inappropriate amount of time debugging and fixing code of gems and plugins which defeats the purpose fo code resue and resulting productivity gain. We have spent many hours and days weeding throuh code of plugin/gem only to find that it has not been upgraded/tested with the realese of Rails we are using.

Before I write more, I would like to hear from others what they think about this problem. And how  Rails community can address this issue.

At present there is no plan to put Saral in an open-source repository such as GitHub.  Once we have a core product developed and beta-tested with customers, we plan to release a scale-down version of the product as a Rails plug-in.

However, we do plan to offer a free trial version of the product to Rails developer full hosted on our infrastructure. If you are interested to test-drive Saral, please sign-up at http://www.saralcms.com

Accordingly Saral is heavily influenced by the ideas and pilosophy behind Rails framework.

The core principles driving Saral’s product development are:

• DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself)
• Convention or Configuration
• Separation of concerns
• Simplify, Simplify, Simplify
• Do one thing but do it right
• Don’t be afraid of saying NO

With Saral we have consciously avoided repeating features and capabilities that are already availalbe with other products.  For example, we decided early on that we are not going spend our energies in providing tools (such as templates, layouts, etc.) for creating web pages using the content within Saral. We strongly believe that “presentation” of the content is not a concern of content management system.  With increasing popularity of CSS and WEB 2.0, the presentation of the content is really a concern of the UI/UX experts and not the cotent authors, editors and publishers.

Similarly, we have kept the number of features in Saral to a critical set that can satisfy the need for  80% of the users.  We will not even attempt to address the need for rest of the 20%.

(click on the image above to see it in full size)

As you can see, Saral is really an infrastructure component that facilitates the creation, management, distribution and publishing of content.  Period.

Saral addresses the need for three groups of users:

1. Content authors, editors & publishers
2. Application programers (Content integrators)
3. Content Managers/System Administrators

1. Content Creation
   For many businesses such as news organizations and publishing houses, content is their most valuable asset.  There is usually a separate content management team consisting of content authors, editors and publishers that is responsible for creating the content.  For these group of users, Saral provides:
   • A web based content editor for entering content into Saral. The content authors have the option of creating the content in any other tool and import the content directly into Saral.
   • A customizable work-flow engine for content authors, editors and publishers to manage the content workflow.
   • Content translation service for translating content in various (supported) languages.
   • Content versioning by language.
2. Content Management
   For content oriented websites such as news portals, entertainment and sports websites,  keeping the content fresh and relevant is a key to keeping the traffic flowing and attracting visitors.  For such sites Saral provides a comprehensive life cycle management for the content:
   • All content is organized in a hierarchical tree to any levels
   • All content (at any level) have optional “publish at” and “expires on” properties that can be set to make the content appear and disappear at scheduled times.
   • Content can be randomized such that different visitors to your site will see different content on the same page.
   • Content can be edited and re-distributed directly for a live site without  going through the content management work-flow. This is critical for quickly correcting errors and removing objectionable content from your site.
3. Content Distribution
   Content Distribution Networks (CDN) have been around for a long time.  Companies such as Akamai and Navisite cater to the high-end market segment that require  global distribution of content across the world. With the advent of new entrants such as Amazon Web Services (S3, CloudFront), CDN is becoming accessible for small to medium size businesses. The Software-As-Service (SAS) and “Pay -As-You-Go”  pricing models have made CDN affordable to many who could not justify the up-front capital cost of purchasing a license OR long term contracts.

   Saral comes with a built-in integration with Amazon’s CloudFront Contnet Delivery Network.  With Saral, you do not have to worry about subscribing to Amazon Web Services and manage the distribution and delivery of your content.  Saral provides the full life-cycle management for your content in the CDN including, distribution, publishing, un-publishishing and refreshing the content from a single administrative console.

4. Application Integration
   An important concept of Saral’s product design is the separation of content from the application.  Saral is a self-contained content management system that is independent of any platform/languages/frameworks. Content stored in Saral CMS can be intgrated into any website regardless of the web server platform or implementation languages. Saral provides client APIs for the most popular web-server platforms: Java, PHP, Rails and Microsoft .NET.

   Release 1.0 of Saral provides a Rails plug-in for integration content into a Rails application. Similarly it provides a JAR library for  integrating the content with any Java based website OR application. Future releases will extend the support to PHT, .NET and other platform as required by the customers.

]]> http://blog.saralcms.com/2009/07/08/what-is-saral/feed/ 486 http://blog.saralcms.com/2009/07/08/what-saral-is-not/ http://blog.saralcms.com/2009/07/08/what-saral-is-not/#comments Wed, 08 Jul 2009 19:44:52 +0000 admin http://blog.saralcms.com/?p=7 Before I talk about what is Saral, it is important to clarify what Saral is NOT.  Content Management Systems have been around for a long time. There are many excellent CMS software out there both in commercial and open-source world.  There is Joomla, Drupal, Plone and many others that are used by small and large companies and individuals.  So why create another content management system software ?

In that regard, Saral should not be categorized as Content Management System. Because it does not have the features and capabilities that most CMS software offer.

1. Saral is NOT a web-site publishing tool. Saral does not claim to get your site up-an-running within hours. It does not have any graphical user interface for end users to create web pages. There are no templates, no fancy WYSIWYG drag-and-drop tools for assembling web pages.
2. Saral is NOT a language translation tool either. It does not claim to auto-magically translate your website into 40 different languages.
3. Saral is NOT an e-commerce software. There are not shopping carts and payment gateways in Saral.
4. Saral is NOT a blogging software.  There are not tools and template to create blogs in Saral.

Then what is Saral?  To find out read the next post http://blog.saralcms.com/2009/07/08/what-is-saral

Few months ago one of my clients approached me with a project to create a multi-lingual advertising portal.  It really warranted a fully fledged Content Management System that can allow simultaneous management and publishing of content is multiple languages.  Being a total Ruby-On-Rails convert, I insisted on implementing the portal on the Rails platform. And so I started my hunt for a Content Management System that is either implemented in Rails OR provided an API to integrate seamlessly with a Rails.

I found plenty of references to content management systems being implemented in Rails. See: http://vpanchal.blogspot.com/2007/07/top-20-ruby-on-rails-content-management.html.

Sadly I could not find a Rails CMS that can come even close to Joomla, Drupal OR Plone. These open-source CMS are matured, time-hardened and choke full of features.  Reluctantly I decided to drop Rails and picked up Joomla.

Read the  this  blog to find out about my two nightmarish weeks with Joomla,,.

The next two weeks was a roller-coaster ride while I created a prototype with Joomla. It was impressive how quickly I was able to develop a portal using Joomla’s out-of-the-box features and 100s of plugins and extensions.  The nightmare really begun when I wanted to customize certain aspects of the site and add new functionality.  In Joomla everything is done through configuration.  It makes it really hard when you want to do something that can not be done through its administrative interface.  It really turn Rails “Convention over Configuration” on its tail to “Configuration Over Convention”.

After a while I got tired of clicking buttons and links on the Joomla’s clunky and slow administrative interface. And I started looking into Joomla’s PHP code to see if I can sneak in my changes directly into the database.

That is when a light bulb went on !! Almost everything that I was doing in Joomla, I could do it better in Rails.  So why not create a CMS that follows the Rails way of creating simple, elegant software that is easy-to-use and fun to work with.

That got me started thinking about what a modern CMS should offer and how can it enhance the Rails framework for developing content-rich websites and applications.