The name of the suite will be the FiveRuns Enterprise management Suite for Rails. The first piece, which is being released today, is RM-Manage, which instruments Rails apps to check where the bottlenecks are occurring; show which interactions or models are being used the most frequently and which interactions are the slowest; analyze the caching of pages or code fragments; and check how the application is using database connections that are provided by the rails framework. It works in concert with FiveRuns existing management tool for the open source LAMP stack.
The next piece, RM-Install, will be released next month and simply consist of the essential libraries for the Rails stack. Although it will be offered for free, there will also be a $49 annual subscription option if you want to get updated with the latest libraries in the Rails stack.
The final pieces, which will be released during the second half of the year, will cover application profiling (this will be called RM-Develop), deployment (providing a GUI-based version of the open source Capistrano utility (to be called RM-Deploy); and end-to-end monitoring from server to client (to be called RM-End to End).
Although Ruby, an object-oriented scripting language that has similarities to Perl and SmallTalk, was developed in the early 90s, it gained rapid popularity because it was well suited for developing Ajax-style applications.
The Rails framework for Ruby, which was developed in 2004, made the language far more accessible because automated much of the process of establishing database connections, and because it provided built-in support for generating the plumbing of Ajax-style applications. Of the 900,000+ downloads of the framework to date, 700,000 of them came during the past year alone.
Although praised for simplifying Web 2.0 development, Ruby on Rails has been critiqued for the lack of commercial tooling support. That’s the market vacuum into which FiveRuns is diving in.
Our management platform was developing using ruby on Rails, said Olivier Thierry, vice president of marketing. It made sense for us to come out with the management pieces for it.
