From: Richard Conroy Date: 2008-01-09T00:18:01+09:00 Subject: Re: questions from a java programmer On Jan 3, 2008 4:45 PM, Ben Turner wrote: > Hi, > > I currently work as a freelance Java programmer doing contracts in > Europe and am very interested in Ruby. > > I have a couple of questions: > > a) What is the current corporate distribution of the language? Is the > language being adopted at all for commercial projects? Well yes, Ruby on Rails is being heavily used in commercial projects, but pure Ruby projects are probably pretty rare indeed. We have probably reached a stage where there are very few green field web projects being started now that use Java in the front tier. It is hard to measure Rails penetration behind corporate firewalls obviously. > b) What is the status of available IDE's/debuggers for platforms such > as MacOS or Linux? Is there anything comparable to i.e. Eclipse? Eclipse has Ruby, Ruby on Rails support, but Netbeans seems to be leading the pack as a full on Ruby, Ruby on Rails IDE. Eclipse had an early lead with RadRails/Aptana, but that effort stalled a while back. It is resuming again. > c) My expertise lies in the telecommunications world - is Ruby at all > suited for large concurrent network applications in the way other > languages like Erlang are? Some people have attempted to use it in such a fashion, its got great, easy to use libraries for it, but the more ambitious tend to hit problems in the interpreter (MRI). Ruby tends to penetrate those kinds of big iron 'X-nines-availability' platforms in a hybrid fashion. You are still running C, Java, Erlang etc. for your core system, but you interface to it through Ruby presentation layers (web UI, scripting, reporting, web services)