Is feasible to develop in Ruby on Rails with limited resources?

Question

I don't know Ruby on Rails and I want to learn it doing something. A very small project was proposed to me, and I was wondering if I could implement it in Ruby on Rails, since I have limited resources.

The office where I should programm doesn't have an internet connection at all, and the hardware is a few years old (Intel Celeron 2.63 GZ, 512 MB RAM, 80 GB hard disk). Also, the operating system is WinXP, with an small chance to use Linux. It is not possible to update those resources, so I have to do what I can with them.

Since I have never do nothing with Rails, do you think is feasible to implement the system with it taking into account that limited resources?

I have the option to develop with whatever I want, but I really want to do it with rails. The system I have to do is a traditional school system, managing students file's, their assistence and ratings, in an state school of the third world.

Answer 1

You should be okay.

Worst case is that you run out of memory, and to fix that you could possibly load Linux on that machine.

If you are working on something that involves a lot of web work and database work, You made a good choice with rails.

Answer 2

It depends on how busy the server is going to be. The hardware sounds fine for lightweight usage, maybe a couple queries per second. Unless it's a huge school, that seems reasonable.

You could certainly use a different platform that would run faster (PHP maybe) but Rails will be much faster and friendlier to develop with once you learn your way around, and I don't think the performance will be an issue for a small system.

(Oh, and if you can, get Linux installed. Like a lot of open-source systems, Ruby gets more usage and development attention on Unix OSs than on Windows, so it tends to work better on them. Linux also makes more efficient use of lesser hardware.)

Answer 3

Check out the Baobab project. They've been using Rails in very hardware- and bandwidth-constrained circumstances - health clinics in Malawi.