Must Have Services in Rails Web Design
Ruby on Rails is what it is because of all the great services that extend and augment it. Here is a quick overview of some services that make creating web apps downright cool.
Hosting
Heroku provides online “cloud” hosting for Ruby applications (Sinatra, Rails, etc.). It uses GIT to deploy and runs on Amazon EC2 servers. The service is free for small applications and reasonably priced for others. Deployment can be done in under a minute.
Databases
MongoHQ and Cloudant are “cloud” MongoDB and CouchDB data stores. According to some, these schema-less services are doing to databases what Rails did to web frameworks: revolutionizing. MongoHQ is free for 16 MB databases and Cloudant is free for 1 GB databases.
Files
Almost every application has some data that does not fit (well) into a database. Picture, video and audio files are all best placed on massive storage. For this, Amazon S3 offers good performance for amazingly low prices (around two cents per GB). Paperclip will ease the integration into a Rails app.
Encoding
Services like YouTube and Vimeo let users upload video files that can then be viewed in the web browser. Implementing this functionality in an application is easy with Panada. Pricing is expensive (starting at $100 a month), but a free developer sandbox lets you try out the service.
Telephony
Need an application to be able to answer the phone? Want to notify your users of events by SMS? Setting up a PBX to do this is daunting. Using Twilio or Tropo will accelerate development time by giving a simple XML web service making and receiving calls or SMS. Both services offer free trial time for development.
