Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
use the web framework and hence Ruby, we looked quite carefully into
the language. What do people say about it? What is the syntax? Does it
somehow limit our abilities especially compared to C [22], which we
earlier used to perform asynchronous monitoring of lab equipment and
similar low-level TCP/IP communication. Our initial investigations did
not lead to any concerns, not even from the experienced colleagues
trained in many of the traditional languages.
Ruby may have been on the hype curve [23] at this time but it is not a
new language. It has been under careful development over more than
15 years by Matz [24], with the aim of combining the best from several
existing languages.
1.5.5 Web framework
Several years of Perl programming had resulted in a lot of code duplication.
The new web framework needed to be an improvement from our Perl
days, providing clear ideas for separation and re-use rather than
copy code.
The Ruby on Rails (RoR) (http://rubyonrails.org/) framework had
been getting a lot of attention at the time, with a focus on the following
concepts.
■
DRY - Don't repeat yourself.
■
Convention over confi guration.
■
REST - or Representational State Transfer, which is the basis for a
RESTful architecture [25], seen by many as the best way to implement
web applications today.
Ruby on Rails was initiated by David Heineman Hansson (DHH) [26] as
part of the Basecamp [27] project. In general, the framework looked very
productive and the vision/thinking from the people behind RoR/37Signals
about software development fi t very well with our internal thinking and
way of working. As it appeared easy to use and there seemed to be high
adoption and very active development, we decided that the future
research informatics development at Lundbeck should be based on RoR.
Although one may download RoR freely, the choices of
how
to serve
the graphical interface, organise modules and workfl ows, pass data
between modules and many other considerations are open and complex.
Thus, our web framework is more than just RoR, it is a Ruby-based
infrastructure for defi ning, connecting and deploying distinct data service
components.
Search WWH ::
Custom Search