# 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:** 3
**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, 6:53pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/on-enterprise-ruby/90258/41 "2007-03-29T18:53:38Z")
> 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. Personally I think this is a cop out. If we’re in the enterprise we’ve got um… let’s see… SANS, Firewalls, VPN’s, Oracle, LDAP, blah blah blah blah blah… All of which are _trivial_ to deploy? No. But people don’t complain (or maybe they do) about those… I think the problem is that Ruby (and Rails) is hyped as being “easy” and so people start thinking along the lines of “ftp my app to my website and it will automatically run like most of my php apps do” instead of something a bit more complex. The sad thing is that in PHP’s case it’s only easy since most web hosts include every module under the sun by default. If you’re on your own box, suddenly all those little requirements (–with-gd, --with-png, –with-jpeg, --with-freetype, --with-imap, etc.) suddenly lead to a _lot_ of dependency installing… which can be at least as hard as deploying a Rails app. The problem with Ruby is that who do I sue if something goes wrong? Java, I sue Sun. .NET, I sue Microsoft. Oracle, I sue Oracle. But Ruby? PostgreSQL? Rails? There's no one for me to sue so my a$$ isn't covered so forget it. I’m partly joking, but at my last job they wouldn’t let us run PostgreSQL for this exact reason. A year later I hear that they are using PostgreSQL because it’s more cost efficient to deploy. Heh. And PostgreSQL _has_ companies you can get official support from… -philip ---
**Author:** ![alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/46a35a/32.png) [@alexeyv](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/alexeyv)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2007, 7:30pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/on-enterprise-ruby/90258/42 "2007-03-29T19:30:45Z")
On 29 Mar 2007, at 17:52, Philip H. wrote: > The problem with Ruby is that who do I sue if something goes wrong? Java, I sue Sun. .NET, I sue Microsoft. Oracle, I sue Oracle. But Ruby? PostgreSQL? Rails? There's no one for me to sue so my a$$ isn't covered so forget it. I spent most of last year mired in this argument over Ruby. Needless to say that project is now being written in “safe” J2EE, the delivery deadline has been pushed back by 12-18 months, and I no longer work for the company concerned. All because the business folks wanted to be able to sue someone if things go wrong. And yes, they really are that clueless that they think Sun can be put in the frame. Ellie ## Eleanor McHugh Games With Brains raise ArgumentError unless @reality.responds\_to? :reason ---
**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, 10:00pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/on-enterprise-ruby/90258/43 "2007-03-29T22:00:42Z")
Rumor has it that Microsoft is planning something big on Ruby, my guess is a VM or a JRuby equivalent on .NET, better than the CLR bridge. Overall the acceptance in enterprise world of Ruby is a good thing, it will further enhance the library support and tooling overtime. Yes there will be substandard programmers churn bloated code and its a shame, but it is something you have to learn to ignore and live with. Ruby community has come a long way on the path of open source and programmer-focused initiatives. It is very unlikely that a heavy weight corporate R2EEing coup could ever take place, short of that I feel safe as long as I write clean code and am actually happy that more and more people are talking about Ruby. - Nasir PS: In the recently held SD West conference, Joe O’Brian had a talk on “Ruby in the Enterprise” ---
**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, 10:48pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/on-enterprise-ruby/90258/44 "2007-03-29T22:48:03Z")
> PS: In the recently held SD West conference, Joe O’Brian had a talk on > “Ruby in the Enterprise” Joe O’Brien’s company EdgeCase held a whole conference on Enterprise Ruby (and Rails) in February. eRubyCon, or something like that. ---
**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, 7:16pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/on-enterprise-ruby/90258/45 "2007-03-29T19:16:41Z")
On 3/28/07, Jason R. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: > For the record, I do agree mostly with this blog post. In terms of quick > development, and mostly in testability, stored procedures are evil. It’s also possible that the terming of things as “evil” doesn’t help. While there are clear and valid arguments against their use, stored procedures aren’t “evil” any more than any other string of characters is[1]. Clearly we prefer to use an object wrapper rather than writing actual SQL, but sometimes you _do_ need to hand over a task to to system which is most suited to performing it, and often that is the database itself. You can certainly minimize the amount of raw SQL that you have to type in the common cases, but eventually we’re all going to hit a task that takes hours via ActiveRecord, but only a few minutes in SQL, right? Stored procedures are just a way of making this logic available to other non-Ruby application (see: integration database; see: interoperability). That’s all, really. It’s fine to be opinionated, but if you’re going to say (or at least imply) “Hey, relational people, yeah? I know you’ve got years of computer science and information theory behind you, but you know what? SQL BLOWS! What’s that? You can prove that your query is optimal? Who cares! Wooo! Ruby! Wooo!” then people who DO need to deal with stored procedures, integration databases and other applications quickly going to start ignoring _everything_ you say, including the valid and useful parts. Clearly I’m exaggerating. The point is that to you can’t convince folks in “enterprisey” situations that they might see some benefit from using Ruby as part of their process if you’ve already alienated them; we can’t go around declaring that everything we don’t like is “evil”, or “just wrong”, and so on. A little bit of understanding goes a long way. [1] That said, as I chant the darke incantation “CREATE PROCEDURE “summoning” AS INSERT INTO my\_house SELECT \* FROM hell” why do I suddenly smell fire and brimstone? ;). ---
**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, 11:43pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/on-enterprise-ruby/90258/46 "2007-03-29T23:43:14Z")
erubycon was rescheduled to July 16-18. You can see more details at [http://erubycon.com/](http://erubycon.com/) Luis > **[Luis de la Rosa](https://www.luisdelarosa.com/)** > > Maker/Manager ---
**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 30, 2007, 2:35am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/on-enterprise-ruby/90258/47 "2007-03-30T02:35:33Z")
Really? You can’t respect the idea that a library which not even the developers feel comfortable calling “production ready”, and which hasn’t stood the test of time, may very well have a high number of bugs? Esp. the kind that show up in nonstandard deployments or heavy usages? Now, a lot of people have written “there are plenty of buggy libraries with high version numbers”. This is most certainly true. But, to invoke Aristotle: (version \> 1) → high reliability IS NOT TRUE But, high reliability → (version \> 1) CAN STILL BE TRUE I’ve used http-access2, soap4r, REXML, popen4, rubygems, etc., and the Ruby interpreter itself, and eventually hit bugs in every single one of these, at least on some platforms. (Yes, I do search for bug reports and file one if there isn’t one already). It’s gotten to the point where, if I’m faced with an inexplicable bug in my code, I make sure to stop debugging my code and confirm that the library it is using is itself bug free. This is a far cry from where things should be (cf. ‘select() isn’t broken’), and is a lot less than the QA provided by J2EE or Microsoft, for that matter (there - I praised Microsoft publicly - now I’ve definitely lost your respect 🙂 .) QA aside, Ruby’s library coverage leaves a lot to be desired. It seems there’s a consens on soap4r. What about HTTP accesss? cURL is wonderful, and has great bindings to dozens of languages - but Ruby is left with http-access2, which is very underpowered compared to cURL. What about image processing? Look at all the complaints of reliability, memory leaks, and restarting daemons you get with RMagick! What about file compression? Another point: error handling. Half the core libraries provide very cryptic error messages when something goes wrong. Google the mailing lists and you’ll see lots of cries for help. This is another area which needs improvement. On Mar 28, 10:07 pm, James Edward G. II [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) ---
**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 30, 2007, 2:52am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/on-enterprise-ruby/90258/48 "2007-03-30T02:52:34Z")
On Fri, 30 Mar 2007, S. Robert J. wrote: > wonderful, and has great bindings to dozens of languages - but Ruby is > left with http-access2, which is very underpowered compared to cURL. > What about image processing? Look at all the complaints of > reliability, memory leaks, and restarting daemons you get with > RMagick! What about file compression? So write something better. Be the person who steps up and fills a void, instead of the person who just whines about perceived voids. > Another point: error handling. Half the core libraries provide very > cryptic error messages when something goes wrong. Google the mailing > lists and you’ll see lots of cries for help. This is another area > which needs improvement. So subscribe to ruby-core and provide patches. 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 30, 2007, 2:40am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/on-enterprise-ruby/90258/49 "2007-03-30T02:40:33Z")
I’m glad to hear that, Charlie. My major point is about libraries: I think JRuby will open up a lot of the industrial strength libraries to Ruby. My concern, though, is that JRuby will not focus on helping Rubyists do Ruby better, but rather help Rubyists talk with Java apps. I’m glad to hear that your goals are larger than that. I think the best - perhaps only - way to make something like this happen is to make interfaces, which are fully in the Ruby spirit and style - that harness Java’s libs underneath. Ruby style interfaces to SOAP, to XML processing, to network protocols, to message passing, etc. - with the elegance and succintness of Ruby, but powered by Java’s industrial strength mettle. What do you say? On Mar 29, 5:00 am, Charles Oliver N. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) ---
**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 30, 2007, 3:25am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/on-enterprise-ruby/90258/50 "2007-03-30T03:25:36Z")
On Mar 29, 2007, at 7:35 PM, S. Robert J. wrote: > You can’t respect the idea that a library which not even the > developers feel comfortable calling “production ready”, and which > hasn’t stood the test of time, may very well have a high number of > bugs? I’m disappointed by your gross generalization. For example, you have no idea how I think or choose version numbers. When I first released FasterCSV, I wanted to be darn sure the parser just worked. I didn’t feel I could recommend people replace CSV with FasterCSV without being very confident it worked. To give myself that confidence, I ran FasterCSV and CSV over all the real-world CSV data I could get my hands on, verifying they produced the same results, except where I wanted FasterCSV to make different choices. I got some of the most clever people in Ruby to dream up all the edge cases they could and I tried those too. I actually got a bug report to remove tests from FasterCSV at one point, because the exhaustive coverage just took too long to run. The parser worked, damn good, at version 0.1.0 though. Trust me. Only one bug has ever been found in FasterCSV’s parser. (There have been plenty in my interface and shortcuts, of course.) However, when I designed FasterCSV, I knew I wanted to add in all the niceties I’ve always wished CSV would do for me. So 0.1.0 was already superior to CSV, in my opinion, but I decided I would call it 1.0.0 when it did everything I wanted. People began using the library immediately and it was very popular long before it hit 1.0.0. It was not what I would call buggy software. 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 30, 2007, 3:20am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/on-enterprise-ruby/90258/51 "2007-03-30T03:20:35Z")
On Fri, 2007-03-30 at 09:35 +0900, S. Robert J. wrote: > What about HTTP accesss? cURL is > wonderful, and has great bindings to dozens of languages - but Ruby is > left with http-access2, which is very underpowered compared to cURL. Just FYI… [http://curb.rubyforge.org/](http://curb.rubyforge.org/) The current version is 0.1.2 though, so maybe it’s not “ready” for you =) Best, Andre ---
**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 30, 2007, 11:20am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/on-enterprise-ruby/90258/52 "2007-03-30T11:20:43Z")
On 2007-03-30, S. Robert J. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: > I’ve used http-access2, soap4r, REXML, popen4, rubygems, etc., and > the Ruby interpreter itself, and eventually hit bugs in every single > one of these, at least on some platforms. I’ve used Oracle and hit bugs. I guess that proves that Oracle isn’t enterprise ready. (OK, it was Oracle 8, but still…) Regards, Jeremy 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 30, 2007, 12:50pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/on-enterprise-ruby/90258/53 "2007-03-30T12:50:54Z")
On 3/30/07, Jeremy H. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: > On 2007-03-30, S. Robert J. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: > > > I’ve used http-access2, soap4r, REXML, popen4, rubygems, etc., and > > the Ruby interpreter itself, and eventually hit bugs in every single > > one of these, at least on some platforms. > > I’ve used Oracle and hit bugs. I guess that proves that Oracle isn’t > enterprise ready. (OK, it was Oracle 8, but still…) I don’t think these are concerns that Robert has. They’re concerns that the enterprise community as a whole has, he’s just essentially relaying them to us. We’re not discussing the legitimacy of these concerns. For the most part we believe they’re just ill-conceived. But the fact is that they exist, and because they exist we can’t explain them away with plenty of reason. Simply put, we can’t address those concerns directly. We must ask why those concerns exist, whether we want to eliminate them, and why, if not, we don’t want to. Ultimately does this come down to a question of developing culture. Is the current Ruby culture willing to accept an enterprise culture in the future? Are we threatened by them? Are we going to let them in but still treat them as outsiders? Should we try to exclude them completely? Bottom line is that curiosity will win over flimsy reasons every time…so unless you have a damn good reason as to why we should exclude the enterprise, they’re going to make their way into our culture. We should do what we can to make them comfortable, and hopefully guide them to a better way but understand when we can’t. If we’re afraid that our culture will be ruined by a tiny drop of poison, we don’t have a culture strong enough worth protecting. ---
**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:** [April 1, 2007, 4:31am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/on-enterprise-ruby/90258/54 "2007-04-01T04:31:31Z")
I largely agree with Pat’s comments. Most of the people I know who are writing code in Ruby (or Rails) fall in 6 broad categories. 1. For fun “scratch the itch” projects. [I belong to this one] 2. Open source projects (Rubyforge/Sourceforge), again for fun or “in good spirit” 3. For profit, but mostly small consultancy work for small “Mom and Pop” enterprises. 4. Slightly bigger consultancy/contracting work but mostly under $20k variety. 5. Free software but paid support (again very small scales 2-5k support) 6. Marginal scripting work inside big companies. (underground/stealth Ruby activity) I have three questions for Rubyists - - Is this the trend they have seen in their enviornments too? - If yes then is this the trend we want to continue to see going forward? - Is a big sized company, like IBM selling “enterprise software” [think Websphere] written in Ruby for a license and a price tag, an anathema? Personally I think that as the popularity of Ruby grows and there are more and more adopters, it is inevitable that there will be some enterprise spin to it with big corporations coming with their own “Enterprise Edition” software in Ruby, including the runtimes. Rails has been a big differentiator and has broken the glass ceiling imposed on other “scripting” languages. Now that Ruby is in limelight, I think Rubyists owe it to themselves to capitalize on this business opportunity. ~nasir ---
**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:** [April 1, 2007, 10:35am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/on-enterprise-ruby/90258/55 "2007-04-01T10:35:58Z")
On 3/31/07, Nasir K. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: > 1. Slightly bigger consultancy/contracting work but mostly under $20k > variety. > 2. Free software but paid support (again very small scales 2-5k support) > 3. Marginal scripting work inside big companies. (underground/stealth Ruby > activity) fwiw, my company doesn’t fall in any of those categories. We’re a “real” company building “real” software, and our software is built entirely on Python and Rails. Revenues are definitely over $20k and hopefully waaaaaaay more than that. Pat ---
**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:** [April 1, 2007, 5:04pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/on-enterprise-ruby/90258/56 "2007-04-01T17:04:30Z")
On 3/31/07, Nasir K. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: > 1. For fun “scratch the itch” projects. [I belong to this one] … 1. Marginal scripting work inside big companies. (underground/stealth Ruby > activity) > - Is this the trend they have seen in their enviornments too? No. ThoughtWorks is not a small consultancy, and we have several commercial Ruby gigs sized 10 to 20 people. There is also this commercial product: [http://studios.thoughtworks.com/mingle-project-intelligence](http://studios.thoughtworks.com/mingle-project-intelligence). It is written in Ruby, too. - Is a big sized company, like IBM selling “enterprise software” [think > Websphere] written in Ruby for a license and a price tag, an anathema? Something like WebSphere (huge clump of expensive closed-sourced middleware) - yes, methinks. In my experience, 9 times out of 10, these things create a lot more problems than they solve. ---
**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:** [April 1, 2007, 5:07pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/on-enterprise-ruby/90258/57 "2007-04-01T17:07:31Z")
On 4/1/07, Pat M. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: > fwiw, my company doesn’t fall in any of those categories. We’re a > “real” company building “real” software, and our software is built > entirely on Python and Rails. Revenues are definitely over $20k and > hopefully waaaaaaay more than that. Same here, except our combination is PHP and Rails. There is nothing “toy” about what we are doing. Then of course there is 37 Signals and ThoughtWorks. Ryan ---
**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 30, 2007, 3:28am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/on-enterprise-ruby/90258/58 "2007-03-30T03:28:36Z")
S. Robert J. wrote: > style - that harness Java’s libs underneath. Ruby style interfaces to > SOAP, to XML processing, to network protocols, to message passing, > etc. - with the elegance and succintness of Ruby, but powered by > Java’s industrial strength mettle. > > What do you say? Absolutely! This is exactly the right thinking. I don’t want JRuby to become incompatible with Ruby any more than you all do, but there are a lot of great libraries to be harnessed on the Java platform. Finding a way to expose them for JRubyists while not diverging from the C Ruby world is going to be a great challenge holding great promise. One great example of a way to potentially harness cross-impl capabilities would be a “good” GUI API that can be backed by a number of libraries. JRBuilder for JRuby takes a Swing-based approach, but the DSL it provides could probably be morphed into something more general purpose. In general I think this is where the best cooperation is to be found, making common APIs that work across implementations, allowing migration, compatibility, and above all, a few solid standards everyone can follow. Rails works on both Ruby and JRuby. So do RubyGems, Rake, RSpec, and now I managed to get Mephisto working. But on JRuby they use different libraries and a different VM. These are the kinds of cross-impl, cross-platform success stories we should be focusing on for the future of Ruby. - 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:** [April 1, 2007, 5:37pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/on-enterprise-ruby/90258/59 "2007-04-01T17:37:00Z")
Alexey V. wrote: > On 3/31/07, Nasir K. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: > > > 1. For fun “scratch the itch” projects. [I belong to this one] I do that, and a little more. I don’t have that many itches to scratch, but Ruby made my life a little easier, but I want to, someday, make money off my skills. Be it Ruby or application development in general. > 1. Marginal scripting work inside big companies. (underground/stealth Ruby > > > activity) I’d say that depends on what “marginal” is. I’m pretty sure most big companies (non-specialized in IT) don’t really care how a particular job is done, as long as it is done fast and reliable. At least, as long as it is for internal use. > > - Is this the trend they have seen in their enviornments too? > > No. ThoughtWorks is not a small consultancy, and we have several commercial > Ruby gigs sized 10 to 20 people. There is also this commercial product: > [http://studios.thoughtworks.com/mingle-project-intelligence](http://studios.thoughtworks.com/mingle-project-intelligence). It is written > in Ruby, too. So, I’m not too much out of my mind, when I learn Ruby and want to make a profit out of the skills I learn. That is good to know. May I cite ThoughtWorks Studios when I’m applying for jobs as a reference of “Real World Ruby” usage? 😉 > Something like WebSphere (huge clump of expensive closed-sourced > middleware) > > - yes, methinks. In my experience, 9 times out of 10, these things create a > lot more problems than they solve. Well, I’m doubting that it would be possible to write “real” bloatware in Ruby, considering it’s tendency to write in a test-driven and agile manner. On the other hand, I’ve never seen a Ruby project of such a dimension. – Phillip “CynicalRyan” Gawlowski [http://cynicalryan.110mb.com/](http://cynicalryan.110mb.com/) Eek! That was supposed to be My Special Law, _MY_ special law, I tell you! 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:** [April 1, 2007, 11:33pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/on-enterprise-ruby/90258/60 "2007-04-01T23:33:34Z")
Alexey V. wrote: > Actually, most do, and rightly so. After an initial release, a successful > application has to be maintained for the next 10 to 30 years. At some point > it becomes “legacy”, which typically means “nobody really understands how > this stuff works anymore; reflecting new business changes is too slow and > too expensive, if at all possible”. Some applications become legacy on > day 1 > of production. Some don’t. Choice of technology plays a big part here. Yes, I’ve experienced that first hand at my old employer. Whole sections of code that have been forgotten, or that had no documentation anymore. And because of a (self-inflicted) lock in with two vendors, together with (really) a bad case of featuritis, the software became a nightmare. And this is a SMB, mind, and not nearly in the same league as SAP or IBM. > So far, people who choose Ruby are people who have a taste for tools and > practices. Alas, much software is created by people with no such taste, and > fragile code can be written code in any language. As a newby to programming in general (sans two short episodes with C# and PHP), I’ve noticed that Ruby makes it really easy to write good, and, more importantly, readable code. I can only speak for myself, but I’m drawn to write my code object-oriented where it makes sense, and in as few lines as possible, while still maintaining flexibility. Of course, this avenue opens itself up slowly, as I learn more and more about Ruby and programming practices in general. One month ago, I wouldn’t have grasped the point of Unit::Test, but now I’m taking a good deep look at it, and I’m going to work with that, too. (It feels filthy to write more than 10 lines of precedural code without tests.) My .02EUR – Phillip “CynicalRyan” Gawlowski [http://cynicalryan.110mb.com/](http://cynicalryan.110mb.com/) Rule of Open-Source Programming #6: The user is always right unless proven otherwise by the developer. [Previous page](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/on-enterprise-ruby/90258.md?page=2) [Next page](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/on-enterprise-ruby/90258.md?page=4)