Anyway, Java isn’t going away, PHP isn’t going away, .NET isn’t going away, Python isn’t going away, and Ruby is only going to get vastly more popular. What I would prefer to see is people realizing that and striving for more interoperability. As a heavy Ruby user in a shop that uses Oracle, I’d love to see Oracle actually contribute more than blogging commentary to the Ruby environment — i.e., actually take a look at the OCI Ruby adapter, at the Rails Oracle adapter, or even release a damned Intel Mac Instant Client library since it seems that a sizeable fraction of Rails developers are on Mac and the vast majority of those are on Intel Mac.

Thanks,
Rick

http://www.google.com/search?q=twitter+11k+per+second

Rich

Rich

Whether Rails is *the perfect* tool for the enterprise? Well… only if you think static typing should be put on the stack of useless programming concepts (you don’t care about the IDE goodies that gets you, and you believe unit testing is a perfect replacement for a compiler), if you don’t believe in a strict separation of logic and presentation (you don’t work with separate designers and/ or you just reproduce pages from photoshop designs), if you don’t believe in object orientation in the view layer (you’d rather program to a ’stateless’ model), if you don’t believe in self contained components (reusability is overrated), etc, then I guess, yes, Rails is the perfect tool for you.

If Ruby were such a gem in and of itself then it would not have taken it over a decade to get above marginal recognition. As a scripting language Ruby has never achieved the popularity of Perl or even Python. So were it not for Rails, Ruby would have remained an unremarkable scripting language without JRuby or other efforts that seems to pop-up on daily basis.

Point 3. I think you underestimate the number of hits that some ‘enterprise’ services cope with.

E.g.
Sainsburys (or any other big supermarket online system)
bt.com (mainly run on weblogic, but mostly customer facing)

I think you will find both of these easily have to cope with 11k+ per min.

And I cannot possibly imagine either of these companies taking a gamble on building using Rails. And Joel was just showing that he thinks with his business head first, putting risk before ‘whats hot’.

I like Rails & Ruby but for enterprise it is not proven compared with (C#, Java, PHP, or Python).

The other consideration is scability and support. I’ve looked at Twitter and they don’t get 11K messages per minute - looks like more like 11K requests per hour.

The messages are pretty small. What if you get 4 million messages per hour and each message is 200K, not 140 characters as with Twitter. Or you need to support 15,000 simultaneous user sessions.

The hardware required is extreme, eBay has 2000 J2EE servers. If they were running Rails, I think they would need 4000+ servers. These things aren’t free and they cost for a long time.

If Ruby could be used to create features that simply could not exist in Java, then go for it. Just remember the time saved for a few developers is being offset in continuous server maintenance for twice as many servers. All for the convenience of a few hours of coding?

Think about it.

1) Ruby on Rails is a super-productive environment for developing applications. It’s faster to build apps in Rails than in Java or .Net, hands down.

Well - Rails is a web-app tool, comparing it to Java or .Net is like comparing apples and oranges. You should be comparing RoR and JSF, Tapestry, Ripes (insert your favorite Java or .Net web framework here).

2) Agree.. totally

3) Again - you have to define enterprise app. I can easily point you to an enterprise app which should/and is capable of handling MORE than 11k request pr. minute (think corporate back-bone CICS like systems and you’ll see WAY more requests)

4) Yes - Rails of JRuby will help the Rails fw to spread. Its the JVM platform that is really interessting.

5) Sure (I dont know - don’t follow Ruby nor Rails much)

Still - Not being much of a Rails kinda guy can you easily write and deploy remote (RPC style) entities with transactional contexts (2PC) and such in Rails.. Else I declare: NO CONTEST!

Not that everyone is successful! Peoplesoft did a good job. But w/ them building everything down the a proprietary language…all the elements are in place!

I agree, Rails has its place and I can think of a number of places it can be used for corporate internal apps. But would I use it to build the high profile, mission critical app avail 24×7 worldwide? No…

I’ve done rails, django, and java enterprise for a long time. IMHO, if you are building a crud app, it’s very fast to do the same in java, esp if you leverage a stack like appfuse, or use hibernate / ibatis to generate your persistence layer. most of the dev time is spent in the UI’s