# On Enterprise Ruby **URL:** \ **Category:** Ruby\ **Created:** [March 27, 2007, 2:20am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/on-enterprise-ruby/90258 "2007-03-27T02:20:26Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/46a35a/32.png) [@alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/alexeyv)\ **Post date:** [March 28, 2007, 3:07am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/on-enterprise-ruby/90258/21 "2007-03-28T03:07:41Z")
Image and market share aside (although those are important considerations), what _real_ limitations does Ruby have for large scale apps ? 1. SOAP. This is a biggy. It’s the top of my list of “real hesitations before recommending Ruby”. Large apps need to talk to other apps. Often, this is via SOAP. Now, soap4r is buggy, poorly documented, and worse of all, has very incomplete WSDL support. 2. Immaturity of Libraries. How many of the libraries that your project depends on have version numbers \< 1.0? 'Nuff said. And there’s also some serious cultural issues: 1. Clever code. Kent Beck says that when he uses a clever trick, he feels bad, that’s he wasn’t capable of using a simple, well known solution. Yet I see a lot of Rubyists - esp. Railers - who seem to get a kick from programatically redefining a class or using method\_missing to avoid a comma somewhere. Come back to that 3 years later, and good luck. 2. Arrogance. All those “databases are stupid, referential integrity is for wimps, and CIOs should be fired” posts. Yuck! To me, the rampant arrogance, combined with immaturity, is the greatest long term risk to the health of Rails. Luckily, there’s been a lot of improvement here, with people recognizing that, yes, if you’re trusting your app with millions of dollars, you can’t deal with it like you do with your blog. ---
**Author:** ![alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/46a35a/32.png) [@alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/alexeyv)\ **Post date:** [March 27, 2007, 11:55pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/on-enterprise-ruby/90258/22 "2007-03-27T23:55:17Z")
On 27 Mar 2007, at 16:43, Alexey V. wrote: > strategic > IT decisions, lots of money to throw at IT problems (much more than > a Web > 2.0 startup), and a zoo of systems and applications, spanning the > last 25 > years of the history of computing. Some of those applications need > to share > data and otherwise cooperate. About right, I’d say, except that _many_ / all of those application need to share data in my experience (utilising every single approach to sharing available: from shared file systems or registries, through to DBs and IP protocols, and no doubt lots of in house stuff). You’ve also got multiple businesses under one roof, all pulling in different directions and all with their own political and technical agendas and allegiances. And you’ve usually got some large and very poor code bases, and almost all of an application’s lines will turn out to interconnection glue when you look at them. 🙂 There are some interesting challenges here. Cheers, Benj ---
**Author:** ![alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/46a35a/32.png) [@alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/alexeyv)\ **Post date:** [March 28, 2007, 3:26am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/on-enterprise-ruby/90258/23 "2007-03-28T03:26:43Z")
On Wed, 28 Mar 2007, S. Robert J. wrote: > 1. Immaturity of Libraries. How many of the libraries that your > project depends on have version numbers \< 1.0? 'Nuff said. So, we’ll all just add 1.0 to existing version numbers, and then the libraries will be mature. > 1. Clever code. Kent Beck says that when he uses a clever trick, he > feels bad, that’s he wasn’t capable of using a simple, well known > solution. Yet I see a lot of Rubyists - esp. Railers - who seem to > get a kick from programatically redefining a class or using > method\_missing to avoid a comma somewhere. Come back to that 3 years > later, and good luck. Eh. There’s a HUGE difference between leveraging language features such as open classes versus being clever just for the sake of being clever, and Ruby certainly doesn’t have a corner on that market, either. > 1. Arrogance. All those “databases are stupid, referential integrity > is for wimps, and CIOs should be fired” posts. Yuck! To me, the > rampant arrogance, combined with immaturity, is the greatest long term > risk to the health of Rails. Luckily, there’s been a lot of And, fortunately, there’s a lot more to Ruby than the Rails world, too. Kirk H. ---
**Author:** ![alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/46a35a/32.png) [@alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/alexeyv)\ **Post date:** [March 28, 2007, 10:24am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/on-enterprise-ruby/90258/24 "2007-03-28T10:24:32Z")
S. Robert J. wrote: > Image and market share aside (although those are important > considerations), what _real_ limitations does Ruby have for large > scale apps ? > > 1. SOAP. This is a biggy. It’s the top of my list of “real > hesitations before recommending Ruby”. Large apps need to talk to > other apps. Often, this is via SOAP. Now, soap4r is buggy, poorly > documented, and worse of all, has very incomplete WSDL support. > Who’s working on this? ---
**Author:** ![alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/46a35a/32.png) [@alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/alexeyv)\ **Post date:** [March 28, 2007, 3:04pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/on-enterprise-ruby/90258/25 "2007-03-28T15:04:50Z")
On 3/27/07, S. Robert J. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: > method\_missing to avoid a comma somewhere. Come back to that 3 years > later, and good luck. For the record, I hear that .NET version 3 is trying to implement open classes, so on top of the responses already given, this is a completely moot point 1. Arrogance. All those "databases are stupid, referential integrity > is for wimps, and CIOs should be fired" posts. Yuck! To me, the > rampant arrogance, combined with immaturity, is the greatest long term > risk to the health of Rails. Luckily, there’s been a lot of > improvement here, with people recognizing that, yes, if you’re > trusting your app with millions of dollars, you can’t deal with it > like you do with your blog. databases are stupid? RI is for wimps? Please, oh please show me posts that say this! I would LOVE to talk to someone who seriously thinks this way! What you probably saw, and heartily decided to misread was someone saying _in a specific case_ that a database was stupid because it added too much complexity to a project. As for arrogance, the only arrogance I see are people like you, unfortunately. All you Java and C# people who have this odd fetish of trying to discredit and bash any language that is even slightly different and for some reason becoming popular. Dynamic Typing?! OH NOES You can’t trust a program without static typing! Open Classes! _feignt_. No, the arrogance is on your side, the people like you who are hurting this industry with a complete inability to adapt to, learn, and develop new ideas. We like to call ourselves Pragmatic. Look into it, and if you haven’t yet, go buy Pragmatic Programmer and read it over and over again. You just may learn something. Tell me, have you even _tried_ Ruby or Rails for more than a day? To be honest, you’re not saying a single thing new that I haven’t seen on blog posts or articles in the past 2 years of people who refuse to try Ruby because it’s different, it’s new, and it’s going to complicate their life (how is of course never discussed, they are just so sure of it). I’ll say again, Ruby is most definitely ready for prime time and has been for many years now. It’s people like you who are hampering the inclusion of this great language into the greater software world, mostly, I think, because you people are afraid of change, deathly afraid. Well here’s a news flash: Software changes daily, and I really pity those people who have missed out on this seemingly obvious fact. Jason ---
**Author:** ![alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/46a35a/32.png) [@alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/alexeyv)\ **Post date:** [March 28, 2007, 4:09pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/on-enterprise-ruby/90258/26 "2007-03-28T16:09:02Z")
On Wed, Mar 28, 2007 at 10:04:08PM +0900, Jason R. wrote: > > later, and good luck. > > For the record, I hear that .NET version 3 is trying to implement open > classes, so on top of the responses already given, this is a completely > moot point There are several things wrong with that statement. First, plans for .NET have nothing to do with the relative merits of open classes, though I’d be interested in reading about what is being planned concerning open classes in .NET if you have a citation. Second, the issue is not open classes themselves, which can be used effectively and appropriately, but as an example (along with method\_missing) of features that are often misused in the name of cleverness and at the expense of maintainability. > way! > [http://www.loudthinking.com/arc/000516.html](http://www.loudthinking.com/arc/000516.html) It’s a post by DHH, primary author of the “opinionated” Rails code. Like it or not, he is a mover and shaker in the Ruby world and in this article he says, “…I consider stored procedures and constraints vile and reckless destroyers of coherence.” > What you probably saw, and heartily decided to misread was someone saying > _in a specific case_ that a database was stupid because it added too much > complexity to a project. The post I refer to above is based on the naive assumption that there is such a thing as an “application database” that is distinct from an “integration database.” Anyone who has worked in any enterprise (defined as a company whose core business is not software but has custom software needs) knows that every database is an integration database. There will eventually be a need for multiple applications to interact with the data. The common response is that the application for which the database is its “application database” is responsible for providing access to the data to other applications via web services. This is a reinvention of the wheel, not to mention an unnecessary layer of abstraction. RDBMSs have been successfully, effectively, and efficiently supporting various authentication and permission models for decades, not to mention supporting constraints to maintain data integrity. It is foolish, not to mention arrogant, to propose writing new, unproven code to implement what already exists and works well. > As for arrogance, the only arrogance I see are people like you, > unfortunately. All you Java and C# people who have this odd fetish of > trying to discredit and bash any language that is even slightly different > and for some reason becoming popular. Dynamic Typing?! OH NOES You can’t > trust a program without static typing! Open Classes! _feignt_. No, the > arrogance is on your side, the people like you who are hurting this > industry with a complete inability to adapt to, learn, and develop new > ideas. Wow, where did all that come from? Ruby is a great language, no question. It is the right tool for many jobs. It could be better, though, and it could be the right tool for more jobs with some improvements. Most of the improvements I’ve seen suggested have to do with libraries (e.g. soap4r) and coding discipline. You aren’t likely to see many people on this list suggesting that it needs static typing, nor that open classes were inherently bad, nor even saying that it needs to be more like C# or Java at the language level. The ability to integrate with existing systems, however, requires a lot of library code that does exist in the Java and C# world and is missing, buggy, and/or inefficient in the Ruby world. When these libraries exist in an efficient and dependable form enterprise adoption will be smoother and more common. > We like to call ourselves Pragmatic. Look into it, and if you haven’t > yet, go buy Pragmatic Programmer and read it over and over again. You > just may learn something. > > Tell me, have you even _tried_ Ruby or Rails for more than a day? To be > honest, you’re not saying a single thing new that I haven’t seen on blog > posts or articles in the past 2 years of people who refuse to try Ruby > because it’s different, it’s new, and it’s going to complicate their life > (how is of course never discussed, they are just so sure of it). Paragraphs like the two above go a long way toward explaining where accusations of arrogance come from. > I’ll say again, Ruby is most definitely ready for prime time and has been > for many years now. It’s people like you who are hampering the inclusion > of this great language into the greater software world, mostly, I think, > because you people are afraid of change, deathly afraid. Well here’s a > news flash: Software changes daily, and I really pity those people who > have missed out on this seemingly obvious fact. I’ve learned and used dozens of languages. I’ve even enjoyed many of them, including Ruby. I understand Ruby, JavaScript, C, C#, and C++ deeply (as well as a few other mini-languages like awk and SQL). They each have their strengths and weaknesses which make them each the right tool for certain kinds of jobs. There is, unsurprisingly, some overlap. I’ve made money programming some of the languages I know, including Ruby. I am currently employed developing a large Ruby on Rails site, though not really for an “enterprise” by the definition I gave above. At a previous job, however, I was working in [VB.NET](http://VB.NET) on a massive internal, mission-critical piece of software for a genuine “enterprise” using a vast database (both in schema and in number of rows) that was accessed by multiple applications. Every DB interaction was through stored procedures for security and accountability reasons. They weren’t using any constraints, but they should have been and the lack of constraints resulted in invalid and corrupt data that had to be detected and cleared manually on a regular basis. Though one of the applications was a web app, Ruby on Rails would have been the wrong tool. In fact, there was no part of the massive system that would have been well-served by Ruby. It required too much integration with existing systems in ways that Ruby doesn’t do well. Someday, perhaps, Ruby will have the library support to make it the right tool, but not yet. To be clear, I like Ruby and I think it is the right tool for a variety of profitable work, including what I am doing now. By the same token, I think that many of the problems that “enterprises” need to solve are ill-served by Ruby and its present ecosystem (e.g. library support). I also think that ecosystem can be improved, if we put in the time and effort to do so. > Jason > –Greg ---
**Author:** ![alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/46a35a/32.png) [@alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/alexeyv)\ **Post date:** [March 28, 2007, 4:37pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/on-enterprise-ruby/90258/27 "2007-03-28T16:37:07Z")
> [http://www.loudthinking.com/arc/000516.html](http://www.loudthinking.com/arc/000516.html) > > It’s a post by DHH, primary author of the “opinionated” Rails code. Like > it > or not, he is a mover and shaker in the Ruby world and in this article he > says, “…I consider stored procedures and constraints vile and reckless > destroyers of coherence.” For the record, I do agree mostly with this blog post. In terms of quick development, and mostly in testability, stored procedures are evil. I’ve worked in a complex integrated Oracle environment before, I’ll just say that it’s something I will never, ever do again. Writing untestable code, of any kind, is the one thing I absolutely HATE to do. That said, I don’t agree on the same stance for database referential integrity. The database is in place to hold data and to make sure relationships exist and are correct, and as such means have been put in place (constraints, referential integrity) to help with this. I can very easily see situations where multiple apps access the same database, so yes, the database needs to know something about relationships (and this stuff _can_ be tested). However, if your Rails application is the only one who will be hitting the database, then constraints and RI can be used but are unnecessary. Jason ---
**Author:** ![alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/46a35a/32.png) [@alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/alexeyv)\ **Post date:** [March 28, 2007, 5:08pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/on-enterprise-ruby/90258/28 "2007-03-28T17:08:16Z")
> However, if your Rails application is the only one who will > be hitting the database, then constraints and RI can be used > but are unnecessary. I disagree; if nothing else, they act as sanity tests for ActiveRecord and your domain objects. - donald ---
**Author:** ![alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/46a35a/32.png) [@alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/alexeyv)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2007, 3:15am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/on-enterprise-ruby/90258/29 "2007-03-29T03:15:58Z")
Wow, some excellent discussion has been generated. I’d like to clarify a few things, from my point of view: 1. I use Ruby extensively. I use Rails extensively. I’m using them currently for a large health care project. I’ve also used them previously in other projects. I think they’re great. 2. The problems I’ve raised are problems that I’ve encountered, in my personal experience, with Ruby, and with Rails. I’m pained by the attitude that “Ruby (±Rails) is perfect, and pointing out any advantages of other platforms is heresy, subject to excommunication”. We need to be able to see our weaknesses in order to grow. Isolation brings stagnation. 3. Library maturity. Some suggested that we could solve the maturity problem by raising the version numbers. I think that suggestion expresses the problem that I’m raising better than I ever could. 4. Clever code: Please read what I wrote. Dynamic typing is wonderful. Open classes can be used for good or evil. But clever code is always bad. What’s the difference? If you use the power of the language to better convey the inherent patterns, that is good. But, if you violate expectations, possibly saving a line or two, but obscuring what’s happening underneath, that is bad. Some examples of the latter are abusive method\_missing use, and gratutitous runtime redefinition of classes. 5. Databases. I got two responses here. - Some saying “yes, referential intergrity is indeed worthless”. I doubt anyone saying this ever worked on a database that a) stores millions of records b) must last many years or c) has very little tolerance for failure. Believe me, eBay has developed their own database layer in Java, to handle massive scalability and parallelization. That’s not the same thing as just haphazardly throwing things into a “dumb, persistent hash”. - and some saying “no one ever said that”. To this, I not only offer the posts cited by others, but the responses to this thread itself. I will point out that there’s been a lot of community wide improvement here - a lot of ignorance has been overcome. DHH has certainly come around on this, and it’s to his credit. Solutions? Well, the cultural issues are the most dangerous - esp. the clever code issue. But, as an individual, you’re not forced here. I’d really, really, really like to see a decent soap4r - I’d even be willing to sponsor. Ruby prides itself - rightfully so - on how “there is no step 3”. Here’s one issue we’re the opposite is true. Consuming a Web Service with a complex WSDL is child’s play in .NET, but takes a lot of work to get right using soap4r. (Sometimes, I just give up, and capture the XML off the wire, and template it!). Perhaps JRuby will address these and library issues, but I think JRuby is targeted more towards using Ruby to talk to Java, not enhancing Ruby in its own right. Perhaps over time, as more people adopt Ruby, all of these issues will be addressed more… ---
**Author:** ![alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/46a35a/32.png) [@alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/alexeyv)\ **Post date:** [March 28, 2007, 7:58pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/on-enterprise-ruby/90258/30 "2007-03-28T19:58:06Z")
On 3/27/07, S. Robert J. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: > Image and market share aside (although those are important > considerations), what _real_ limitations does Ruby have for large > scale apps ? > > 1. SOAP. This is a biggy. It’s the top of my list of “real > hesitations before recommending Ruby”. Large apps need to talk to > other apps. Often, this is via SOAP. Now, soap4r is buggy, poorly > documented, and worse of all, has very incomplete WSDL support. Tell me about a single library that has complete WSDL support. I’ve been working with several Java libraries, .Net library, the customized SAP Java library, and several other minor ones, and they all provide some subset of WSDL spec and they all have interoperability problems. soap4r has a very descent WSDL support as long as you don’t go beyond rpc/encoded style. > 1. Immaturity of Libraries. How many of the libraries that your > project depends on have version numbers \< 1.0? 'Nuff said. You don’t go too far with this attitude. I know several libraries with version 0.x that have more features and less bugs than ones that carry [1-9]+.x version tag. > And there’s also some serious cultural issues: > > 1. Clever code. Kent Beck says that when he uses a clever trick, he > feels bad, that’s he wasn’t capable of using a simple, well known > solution. Yet I see a lot of Rubyists - esp. Railers - who seem to > get a kick from programatically redefining a class or using > method\_missing to avoid a comma somewhere. Come back to that 3 years > later, and good luck. I’ve no problem with a clever code. I’ve problem with an obscure code. > 1. Arrogance. All those “databases are stupid, referential integrity > is for wimps, and CIOs should be fired” posts. Yuck! To me, the > rampant arrogance, combined with immaturity, is the greatest long term > risk to the health of Rails. Luckily, there’s been a lot of > improvement here, with people recognizing that, yes, if you’re > trusting your app with millions of dollars, you can’t deal with it > like you do with your blog. Take [ebay.com](http://ebay.com) as an example. They use neither the referential integrity nor the database’s transactional support. I guess from your prospective this company is immature and arrogant. ---
**Author:** ![alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/46a35a/32.png) [@alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/alexeyv)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2007, 4:09am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/on-enterprise-ruby/90258/31 "2007-03-29T04:09:03Z")
On Mar 27, 2007, at 8:05 PM, S. Robert J. wrote: > 1. SOAP. This is a biggy. It’s the top of my list of “real > hesitations before recommending Ruby”. Large apps need to talk to > other apps. Often, this is via SOAP. Now, soap4r is buggy, poorly > documented, and worse of all, has very incomplete WSDL support. I have to agree on this one and it make me sad. I’ve had to use this library three times in the last month and all three have been insanely painful. It is easier to just capture a well-formed request and fill it out as a template and this is tragic. This has become the number one standard library I really want to see redone. > 1. Immaturity of Libraries. How many of the libraries that your > project depends on have version numbers \< 1.0? 'Nuff said. And then you lost all of my respect… James Edward G. II ---
**Author:** ![alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/46a35a/32.png) [@alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/alexeyv)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2007, 11:01am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/on-enterprise-ruby/90258/32 "2007-03-29T11:01:45Z")
S. Robert J. wrote: > Perhaps JRuby will address these and library issues, but I think JRuby > is targeted more towards using Ruby to talk to Java, not enhancing > Ruby in its own right. Perhaps over time, as more people adopt Ruby, > all of these issues will be addressed more… Au contraire…JRuby aims to be the best Ruby possible on the JVM. If that ultimately means we solve some issues (threading, performance, unicode, scaling) before/better than the C implementation, so be it. But it will still be Ruby, and we intend to run all the same apps unmodified (or as close to unmodified as possible). - Charlie ---
**Author:** ![alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/46a35a/32.png) [@alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/alexeyv)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2007, 12:08pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/on-enterprise-ruby/90258/33 "2007-03-29T12:08:57Z")
On Thu, 29 Mar 2007, Charles Oliver N. wrote: > unmodified as possible). > I think Robert was hinting toward the idea that once JRuby is “usable” > (however that might be defined) it will have access to Java’s mature > libraries, instead of using Ruby’s XML, SOAP, … (others?), which are > not > as far as Java’s. > \*t – ---
**Author:** ![alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/46a35a/32.png) [@alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/alexeyv)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2007, 3:21am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/on-enterprise-ruby/90258/34 "2007-03-29T03:21:59Z")
How much work is it to get to a good soap4r? Aur ---
**Author:** ![alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/46a35a/32.png) [@alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/alexeyv)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2007, 12:11pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/on-enterprise-ruby/90258/35 "2007-03-29T12:11:58Z")
On Thu, 29 Mar 2007, SonOfLilit wrote: > How much work is it to get to a good soap4r? Look at the code. Last time I was debuging it I didn’t stumble over a single (!) line of comments - but maybe I wasn’t looking well enough, or my memory might be flawed. Anyway - I gave up. And if you want to hack on SOAP you better know the specs (in addition to the XML ones), which isn’t a small bite either. So I guess my answer is: it’s not trivial. \*t – ---
**Author:** ![alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/46a35a/32.png) [@alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/alexeyv)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2007, 1:29pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/on-enterprise-ruby/90258/36 "2007-03-29T13:29:34Z")
On 3/29/07, Tomas P.'s Mailing L. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: > > scaling) before/better than the C implementation, so be it. But it will still > > be Ruby, and we intend to run all the same apps unmodified (or as close to > > unmodified as possible). > > I think Robert was hinting toward the idea that once JRuby is “usable” > (however that might be defined) it will have access to Java’s mature > libraries, instead of using Ruby’s XML, SOAP, … (others?), which are not > as far as Java’s. > \*t On JRuby ‘usability’: I was at a Spring (the Java DI framework) conference recently where Spring global transaction support (i.e. really difficult to do, even in Java, enterprisey stuff, go-to-jail-if-you-get-it-wrong etc. etc.) got dependency injected into Java code, and then bubbled up the call stack to Ruby code running on top of it. All through JRuby. Good enough for me. Also consider that the Java library space is not a mature superset of the Ruby library space. Ruby brings a lot of interesting techniques to Java developers. By using both you have _increased_ the amount of tools available to you. ---
**Author:** ![alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/46a35a/32.png) [@alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/alexeyv)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2007, 5:46pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/on-enterprise-ruby/90258/37 "2007-03-29T17:46:26Z")
OK, I’d like to ask about technology problems. Specific obstacles that make Ruby either less appealing, or not at all feasible on some corporate IT projects. So far, only messaging was mentioned on this thread. The other thing people on ThoughtWorks Ruby projects complained about was continuous integration. CruiseControl.rb is our solution to that problem. We also hear some bitching about production deployment. I think with the advent of Mongrel it’s much less of an issue, but it’s been a fast moving target over the last couple of years, and new people find it hard to figure out the current state of the art. What else? ---
**Author:** ![alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/46a35a/32.png) [@alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/alexeyv)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2007, 3:52pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/on-enterprise-ruby/90258/38 "2007-03-29T15:52:16Z")
Tomas P.'s Mailing L. wrote: > I think Robert was hinting toward the idea that once JRuby is “usable” > (however that might be defined) it will have access to Java’s mature > libraries, instead of using Ruby’s XML, SOAP, … (others?), which are > not as far as Java’s. > \*t Sure, I understand that…and I agree with Richard that Ruby’s libraries also bring a few gems to the table as well. I just intended to dispel any rumor that JRuby was “just about bringing Ruby to Java”, since it is also our goal to make as great a standalone Ruby as we can. - Charlie ---
**Author:** ![alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/46a35a/32.png) [@alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/alexeyv)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2007, 6:32pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/on-enterprise-ruby/90258/39 "2007-03-29T18:32:36Z")
> Call me a reactionary, but if we all just agree to ignore them > they’re bound to go away eventually. I think you’re right. This is really something the programming language ecosystem will handle automagically. If you look at the main programming languages used at all the hip Web 2.0 startups, they’re using Lisp for user interface scripting and Smalltalk for their web framework. The Smalltalk they’re using runs on Unix and sometimes quacks like Perl, and the Lisp they’re using has this weird syntax based on Java, but the long and the short of it is that quality wins. Let the bloatware monkeys do what they want. It’s their money to lose. ---
**Author:** ![alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/46a35a/32.png) [@alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/alexeyv)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2007, 6:22pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/on-enterprise-ruby/90258/40 "2007-03-29T18:22:35Z")
I think even messaging has become less and less of a detriment. Reliable Messaging from Assaf Arkin gives you a solid pure-Ruby option and stomp gives you the ability to talk to ActiveMQ servers (and there’s a new library that’s being worked on for the new fangled messaging dealies from Java). All in all, I think messaging is less of a detriment. Though, soap4r has made me kill small animals before out of frustration. That should probably be fixed, eh? Google SoC anyone (even though it’s too late)? 😉 –Jeremy On 3/29/07, Alexey V. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: > advent of Mongrel it’s much less of an issue, but it’s been a fast moving > target over the last couple of years, and new people find it hard to figure > out the current state of the art. > > What else? > > – > Alex Verkhovsky – [http://www.jeremymcanally.com/](http://www.jeremymcanally.com/) My free Ruby e-book: [http://www.humblelittlerubybook.com/book/](http://www.humblelittlerubybook.com/book/) My blogs: > **[Site not found · DreamHost](http://www.mrneighborly.com/)** > > The owner of this domain has not yet uploaded their website. [http://www.rubyinpractice.com/](http://www.rubyinpractice.com/) [Previous page](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/on-enterprise-ruby/90258.md?page=1) [Next page](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/on-enterprise-ruby/90258.md?page=3)