From: Kent Sibilev Date: 2007-03-29T02:57:16+09:00 Subject: Re: On Enterprise Ruby On 3/27/07, S. Robert James 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. > > 2. 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: > > 3. 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. > > 4. 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 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. -- Kent --- http://www.datanoise.com