Prototyping in rails

Now this is a truly bizarre thought. Many business apps and the underlying databases are a bit more complicated than the standard web app. Occasionally it is even necessary to populate the model that you plan to implement and let the users test drive the model through the UI.

This approach used to be called rapid-prototyping, but has rather fallen out of favor.

However, as the browser is becoming (has become) the dominant UI now, there is perhaps an opportunity to do a rapid prototype of some system functionality so the users can be assured that you have the relationships right and that you can quickly demonstrate some scenarios.

This tends to be a royal pain, and then it hit me. Rails is such a quick to develop framework that getting some gnarly prototypes out quickly is very little problem. Of course we don't want to be too convincing because the users might think we have done the hard bits. But really what we will have done is:

Create a simple database model with the interesting relationships (keys/fks, etc.)
Populated that model with some made up data - careful cases
Allowed the users to manipulate/navigate the data through a familiar approach. For example in an auction site, you may have many bids. So a 1:m relationship there. We could show an auction with its many bids easily, then click on a bid to go deeper, ensuring we have a link back to the auction.

using RESTful principles and RAILS quite a lot of this is generated with the scaffold. That's a lot of power.