Persapient Systems

Our preferred application development environment

Ruby on Rails is currently Persapient's framework of choice for developing web-based applications. Systems that are developed and hosted in-house are run on Unix (FreeBSD) servers and backed by PostgreSQL databases.

Features of the Ruby on Rails framework include the following:

Working application prototypes can be implemented rapidly. This provides more opportunities for customers to see how requirements are being met, helps reduce miscommunication and requirement oversights, and allows for increased customer participation and feedback during the design process.
Comprehensive use of the model-view-controller design pattern allows for the disentanglement of user interface code from other system operations. Because of this, the overall "look and feel" of the application can be modified without compromising the underlying business logic (and vice versa).
The fully-featured open source application framework -- including native support for object-to-relational database mapping, sessions, e-mail integration, dynamic web interfaces via Ajax, and web services -- brings enterprise-class software within the reach of small-to-mid-sized businesses and organizations.

Although Ruby on Rails is currently enjoying buzzword status on the Internet, the excitement is well-deserved. Persapient co-founder Bryan Krofchok has worked on web-based applications using a variety of languages and frameworks (including CGI-BIN scripts written in Perl, Active Server Pages, Java servlets, Vignette, Java Server Pages, and Mason), and has test driven many other frameworks. With Ruby on Rails, he has found a well-designed, feature-rich, flexible, and technologically mature framework that allows developers to focus more time on the needs of the application at hand, rather than the needs of the framework (such as the repetitive and unnecessarily complicated drudgery often associated with transferring data between applications and databases).