From: Charles Oliver Nutter <charles.nutter@...>
Date: 2007-11-13T03:03:42+09:00
Subject: Re: enterprise ruby

Jay Levitt wrote:
> On Sun, 11 Nov 2007 22:32:14 -0500, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
> 
>> For 2, given that Ruby operates on most platforms, it's almost always 
>> possible to accomplish 2 using "loose coupling" with little or no 
>> penalty.
> 
> Possible, yes.  (Again, Turing-complete and all that.)  But it depends what
> you mean by "penalty". 
> 
> The very first thing I think of when I think "Ruby and native extensions"
> is RMagick/ImageMagick for a web site.  And that's notoriously difficult to
> build even in a C-based, MRI environment, although I understand that's
> supposed to be better now in 2.0 (I haven't tried it yet).
> 
> What would the "right answer" be in JRuby?  I just did some Googling, and
> from what I can tell, there are a few ways you could go:

The truth is there's probably another dozen options beyond those listed 
here, so it's hard to say what the best approach would be. There's even 
a Java-based ImageMagick that either wraps or duplicates IM's functionality.

So I guess there's an important introductory question to ask before we 
would start investigating:

Is it ImageMagick's exact specifications or general image processing we 
want to provide? The former is obviously much harder, while the latter 
can be done through any number of libraries.

I think you'd be hard-pressed to find any library in the C world that 
doesn't have a reasonably good equivalent in the Java world (sometimes 
that just wrap those libraries from the C world). So it's certainly 
possible and reasonable to say most extensions could be provided in a 
similar-if-not-identical form under JRuby with just a bit of plumbing. 
And thankfully JRuby's integration with Java means that plumbing should 
be less than equivalent in the C world (i.e. the C world is fraught with 
peril, as RMagick's occasional instability has shown).

- Charlie