From: Philip Hallstrom <ruby@...>
Date: 2007-03-30T01:52:59+09:00
Subject: Re: On Enterprise Ruby

> 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.

<pointy hat on>
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.
</pointy hat off>

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