From: Jason Roelofs <jameskilton@...>
Date: 2007-03-27T22:41:57+09:00
Subject: Re: On Enterprise Ruby

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Personally, any (and every) time I hear the word "enterprise software", I
can only think of enormously over-engineered, bloated software full of more
WTFs than you can shake a stick at, and if it actually does work is nothing
short of surprising. Ruby is the language us Pragmatic programmers use. The
whole point is to create only what you need and *exactly* what you need, no
more, no less, and Ruby lets us get there (at least for me) faster than any
other language I've ever used. If the resulting product after months of
development can be classified as "enterprise", well then more the better.

From personal experience, it would take me less time to write libraries that
don't exist if I'm doing major software development in Ruby than it would
take me to deal with other languages with tons of said libraries, just
because of the barriers intrinsic in said languages (I'm looking at you,
Java).

Ruby IS ready for prime time, and it has been for some time now. Just take a
look at www.revolutionhealth.com if you don't believe me. Mr AOL himself,
Steve Case, is starting up a new health insurance company with a massive web
portal written in Rails.

So yeah, no more of this "Ruby isn't ready" crap, because it is. And please,
stop using the word "enterprise". It may have started off good, but scores
and scores of bad code has tarnished the word.

Jason

On 3/27/07, Alex Young <alex@blackkettle.org> wrote:
>
> Tomas Pospisek's Mailing Lists wrote:
> > On Tue, 27 Mar 2007, Alex Young wrote:
> >
> >> Alexey Verkhovsky wrote:
> >>> I want to ask one more question: why is the E-word anathema in this
> >>> community? Yes, people choose fancy words for self-description. Yes,
> >>> these
> >>> words can become associated with bad things. And yes, staying away
> >>> from the
> >>> whole thing is a possible lifestyle choice. Changing the game is
> another
> >>> equally valid choice, however. So, who or what are we, as a community,
> >>> sending those "$&#* off!" signals to?
> >>
> >> The problem with the term "enterprise" is that it doesn't seem to have
> >> a clear, consistent definition as applied to software (or, indeed, to
> >> anything else), which, in a software-centric community, makes it
> >> pretty worthless as a description.
> >
> > Um well, it's about as clear the expression "software that doesn't
> > suck", which is intuitively understandable by anybody doing software I
> > guess.
> Maybe to you.  Not to me.  I've seen "enterprise" used with any/all of
> the following connotations, among others:
>
> - Integrating across system boundaries (your definition)
> - Encompassing all business processes internally
> - Used in a business environment
> - Hot-deployable from a single central source across a network
> - Having live failover capabilities
> - Having good static analysis tools
> - [3,4,5] 9's uptime
>
> All of these are completely different, and refer to wildly disparate
> aspects of development, deployment and use.
>
> This is my point, in a roundabout sort of way - while it's very easy to
> pick on any one of these and say "because Ruby doesn't meet this
> particular requirement out of the box, it's not worth looking at any
> further," that's to ignore the successes that people are having with
> Ruby in otherwise traditional environments, as alluded to by the OP.
>
> <snip>
> > Starting from the above definition and from my experience, enterprise
> > means integrating accross system boundaries, and integrating means SOAP
> > and XML (I am not arguing here that it can't be done differently). And
> > SOAP and XML is where Ruby is not shining. Thus as a colorary "Ruby is
> > not enterprise ready" as you say.
> Is that definition widely accepted?  Is that what the term "enterprise"
> means in the expression "enterprise Ruby stack?"  That's a honest
> question - it's not how I read it, but I'd like to hear your point of
> view.
>
> --
> Alex
>
>

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