Ruboss Technology Corporation

Dima and I have been working hard not only on the Ruboss Framework, but also on a book which demonstrates how to use the framework correctly. This is finally ready for Beta release: http://manning.com/armstrong2/

The first chapter is freely available from http://www.manning-source.com/books/armstrong2/ch01_meap_enterprise.pdf.

Currently only 2 chapters are available, but many more will be added over the months ahead. We released this as early as possible, so that the framework documentation situation (which can currently only be described as “awful”) is improved.

Manning is pricing the PDF at $29.99 and the combo pack at $54.99. Frankly, if you were just buying the two chapters that are in the book, it would be borderline whether it would be worth it for you at this point–especially if you have followed along with the available free documentation. This is doubly-true since the first chapter is free. (If you bill your time hourly, however, it is probably still worth it.)

However, this is obviously not the finished product: this book is going to be the defining book about the Ruboss framework. By the end of the book, we will have included a discussion of BlazeDS and JRuby, Merb, Google App Engine, etc. (It’s not there yet, of course, since we haven’t even built the support for these into the framework yet!)

We want to emphasize two things:

1. The job of the book is to sell the framework, not the other way around. (The Ruboss Framework is the foundation of our company–which is currently 4 developers. It’s not something we’re building to sell books.)

2. We are going to continue to improve the free documentation, on the wiki and the blog. (The limiting factor on the free documentation is time, not any desire to not “compete” with the book.)

If you want to use the Ruboss framework on a project at work, having Enterprise Flexible Rails as a Manning book may help your chances, as it helps to counter the “lack of documentation” criticism. (Also, the Manning name adds some extra legitimacy for an Open Source project at such an early stage.)

The project in Enterprise Flexible Rails is going to be building an agile project management application intended for small teams. (Once again, I’m going to call this project Pomodo. No, it’s not the Pomodo from Flexible Rails: I just like the name!) The reason for this choice is entirely selfish: I want to build an application that my company can use once it’s done. We’ll write about our own dog food, as well as eating it…

As always, all feedback is very much appreciated.

Thanks,
Peter Armstrong and Dima Berastau