From: khaines@...
Date: 2006-10-20T00:13:49+09:00
Subject: Re: Is anyone using Ruby for 24/7 financial applications?

On Thu, 19 Oct 2006, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:

> khaines@enigo.com wrote:
>> I am.
>>
>> The other day I restarted the IOWA process for a web site that had been
>> running 270 days without a problem.  I only had to restart it because of
>> something dumb that I did.
>
> I can't remember the last time *I* went 270 days without doing something
> dumb. :)

Fortunately, most of the time I can completely ignore the app server 
processes.  I have some just-in-case monitoring of them, and I spot check 
some of them every day, but they only get restarted, generally, because 
I've changed something that won't get autoreloaded or I just feel that 
hard to shake paranoia about processes that have been running for months 
on end.

> That is wonderful to hear! Just out of curiosity, how did you discover
> Ruby and what led you to become an "early adopter?"

Well, I was sitting in the resturant of a hotel in Golden, Colorado, 
reading a magazine.  I can't recall if it was a Linux magazing with an 
article in it by one of the big Perl guys of the time, or whether it was 
in fact a Perl magazine, but either way, there was an article in it, by a 
Perl guy, about Ruby.  I loved what I saw.  So, in my free time I started 
playing with it, recoding pieces of my Perl code (I'd been a hardcore Perl 
user for a long time) into Ruby and comparing.

I loved it.  Almost everything that I wrote ended up being both shorter 
and easier to read, and I was a Perl guy who tried really hard for easy to 
read code (I even went so far as to implement an exception handling lib in 
Perl that wrapped almost all of the Perl builtins), so that made an 
impression.  Around this same time I stumbled across the nascent IOWA 
implementation, by Avi Bryant.  I had, in the past, implemented more than 
one MVC framework for Perl in an attempt to improve on what was available 
in that world, and I loved the concepts that I was seeing with IOWA.  It 
was completely a proof of concept, though, that was impossible to use for 
an production usage.

Then, a couple things happened.  I got laid off from my job, and through a 
friend, I picked up a contract to implement a resume posting, job hunting 
web site for the Milwaukee Chamber of Commerce, for college students to 
hunt for internships, and companies to hunt for interns.  The wrinkle was 
that I only had about two weeks to implement the whole thing.  What to do?

The safe route would have been to do it in Perl.  I'd been doing Perl 
forever, and knew well the world of web devel with Perl.  After playing 
with Ruby so much, though, the thought made me cringe.  So I hunted for 
Ruby options.  About the only things for web development at the time were 
the CGI library or the Cerise framework.  Or IOWA, if it could be made 
into something a person could practically use.

I did the stupid thing.  I picked Ruby and IOWA.  I hacked IOWA until I 
had a workable solution, and built the site.  It was done with all of the 
features they requested, on time.  It ran without a problem for two years 
until they discontinued their program.  And I was hooked.  Ruby was great. 
IOWA was great.  Web devel was never so fast or easy, and the code was 
easy to read and maintain.  I've used Ruby for everything I could since.


Kirk Haines