12:22pm, Sunday, March 26th, 2006 | Ruby On Rails

The Nuclear Proliferation of Little Rails Apps

by J. Dueck

The supreme elegance of frameworks like Ruby on Rails makes it easy to create great little web apps – and tempting to think that others might actually need them.

It’s the wave of the future. Simple jobs that can be done easily using common applications, or even just with a cheap notebook and a pen, are now candidates for web-based applications. Rails developers are eager to jump on this trend, motivated partly by a sense of design purity, and partly by the hope of a stream of revenue & recognition.

I’m not talking about all web applications. I’m talking about the sector of web apps that is the most out of control: the little ones. I’m talking about the easy-coding apps that are low-hanging fruit within the grasp of any novice programmer. To-do lists, outline creators, link bookmarkers, etc.

The extremely “basic,” or simplified nature of the tasks that these apps perform usually means that there is almost always an existing solution in place that must somehow be dethroned. For example, here’s one called Outlinr, just for creating outlines¹. Why a separate web app just for outlines? Here’s what the author says:

“Well, I believe that a tool should have a single task and do it very well, you shouldn’t have to open Acrobat, Microsoft Word, or CrossOver Office, or any other big, huge, monolithic application to write a simple note or an outline.”

Taken in isolation, each of these little apps is kinda cute, maybe even useful. So what’s the problem?

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Let’s say that, despite my limited means, I have a butler². He takes care of everything

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