Dear Force.com Developers, Give Ruby a Try

By Richard Vanhook | Published: August 3, 2012

RubyI’ve been a coder for 10+ years and adamantly believe it’s important to experiment and dabble in other languages as much as possible. For the last year or so, my dabbling has been entirely focused on Ruby and Heroku — and I have to admit, I’m in love. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge fan of Apex and Visualforce and use both almost daily. But I like having other options, and I would encourage all developers to likewise dabble, and even ultimately add Ruby and Heroku to their toolbelt.

Introducing the Databasedotcom-oauth2 Gem

If you’re interested, and I certainly hope you are, I’ve created a new Ruby gem (library) that makes integrating Ruby and Heroku with Force.com and Database.com straightforward. It’s an extension of the databasedotcom gem called databasedotcom-oauth2.

What is this new gem all about? Well, several things:

  • An extension of the databasedotcom gem that simplifies authorization with Force.com or Database.com for Ruby web apps via OAuth 2.0
  • A Ruby gem intended to run as Rack Middleware
  • An alternative to using OmniAuth and the corresponding omniauth-salesforce gem.

To give Ruby a try via the databasedotcom-oauth2 gem, follow the tutorials contained here: Introduction to the databasedotcom-oauth2 Gem.

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  • Anonymous

    Thanks Richard,
    I was thinking on learning the Ruby and now from this post my belief to give a shot to ruby was absolutely right.

  • Andy Schwartz

    Couldn’t agree more. Now just searching for an opportunity to combine existing Apex experience with Ruby development.

  • http://twitter.com/TehNrd Jason Venable

    Would love to see an article along the lines of this is how you do “functionality X” on force.com with Apex and Visualforce. And this is how you do the equivalent with Ruby on Rails app. Also explaining some of the core difference how how to approach them. For example RoR doesn’t have the concept of viewstate and how apps should be built without it coming form a force.com visualforce perspective.

  • http://twitter.com/richardvanhook Richard Vanhook

    Agreed, would be nice.