Pluit has just embarked on a new Ruby On Rails project with Exploit Technologies Pte. Ltd., a commercial arm of
Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) that helps to identify, protect and exploit Intellectual Property (IP) created by the Research Institutes (RIs) funded and managed by A*STAR.

This project marks the beginning of Pluit’s involvement in commercial project using Ruby On Rails (RoR), and Pluit’s second RoR project after BookJetty (the next release, coming up real soon). Although I am happy for this achievement, but behind it, it was a tough job to push RoR to the corporate world who likes the word ‘Enterprise’.

You can say RoR is still relatively new, as version 1.0 was released in December 2005; but in a hot open-source world — a year is relatively very long. Lots of stuff can happen within a year, just look at how much RoR has changed since v1.0.

In fact, RoR has spread like a wild-fire in US, Japan, Europe and Canada. But in Singapore, people and companies are still very careful about RoR. So questions like this are common, as I was also asked:

“Who is backing Rails and Ruby?”

“Are they going to be another abandoned open-source project in the next few years?”

Well, you can’t blame them, there’s a common saying here that says, You don’t love, because you don’t know. But does BIG always mean good? How about looking at EJB 1.0 and 2.0, JSTL, and Java Server Faces, are they good? I am not sure about you, but people do question, even though it is backed by big company. And I meant really BIG company.

With this project going, I hope in the next couple of months, there will be greater acceptance for RoR. And speaking from devleoper’s perspective, it is NOT the end result that counts, but how do you achieve the result that really counts. With RoR, all I can say is HALLELUJA.