We are doing an experiment in using Ruby for an internal project at work. I am the most experienced in Ruby so I’m leading the choices of gems and so forth and the team questioning those choices has lead to a bit of a personal epiphany.

I know that for a long while I have preferred simple tools and components. Simple tools tend to be more enabling as they give you control over precisely what is happening in your application whilst managing the boilerplate code for you. I’ve also focused my personal development and reading on fundamental principles to give me a solid grounding in concepts that can then be applied to any situation or language.

These opinions are being reflected in the tools I use for my Ruby development and therefore what I am encouraging the other developers at my company to use: Sinatra and Sequel. I enjoy the power you get from both to exploit all that is available from HTTP and SQL. I find it much easier to apply my knowledge of HTTP gained through reading about REST, though I doubt I’ll ever write a truly RESTful application. Things such as returning the correct HTTP codes and headers to enable client and proxy caching are ridiculously easy to do when compared to ASP.NET MVC. Being able to leverage my knowledge of SQL allows me to fine tune that vital query yet Sequel will still give me back easily consumable objects.

Choosing these simple tools for our task will help the team to learn Ruby and build an application, the real point of the task, rather than spending a large period of time learning how to use a more powerful framework such as Rails. The simpler tools should also let them exercise more of their existing knowledge, again allowing them to focus on learning the Ruby language rather than being distracted by Ruby frameworks.

As for me, I’m happy I’ve chosen this method of working and learning. I think it will stand me in good stead for working in any language I may want or need to learn in the future. It will be interesting to hear what the team thinks of this approach as we proceed.