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Managing technology for Barefoot, I get frequent questions from clients and colleagues about Rails, and why we’ve invested time and energy in using it. “Isn’t just it the flavor of the month?” “Isn’t it just popular because it’s open source?”

Because I am such a fan of the technology, it would be easy to dismiss these questions with the same disdain you’d see when asking a Mac zealot why a Mac’s better than a PC. But the question is legitimate. There are hundreds of technologies and platforms out there, and all of them promise something, so why Rails? There are tons of reasons to love it, but as an agency, there’s one strength in particular that just fits:

Rails excels at relationships. In fact, I’d venture to say that’s what it does best. And when it gets down to it, that’s what Barefoot does for its clients. We try to make it easy to see the relationship between Dawn and saving wildlife, Mickey’s Fine Malt Liquor and irreverance, and hell, when you think about Barefoot, we want you thinking about trading up.

Rails makes relationships easy. Yesterday, the long-awaited launch of Rails 1.2 happened, and with it, realtionships are even easier. Gone are the days of writing tons SQL joins like this one:

SELECT d.document_id
FROM documents d
LEFT OUTER JOIN parties p
on d.document_id = p.document_id
WHERE p.party_id is null;


In Rails, we set up relationships in plain English. A blog has_many posts. An author belongs_to a blog post, and a blog post has_many comments. With these kinds of relationships established, getting to all the posts by a particular author is easy: @author.posts

Whether you understand the code or not is irrelevant; the point is this: Rails makes creating, using and extending relationships easy. As an agency we strive to do the same. As it should be.