From: Piergiuliano Bossi <p_bossi_AGAINST_SPAM@...>
Date: 2004-01-29T01:15:00+09:00
Subject: Re: choosing ruby?

Thanks to everybody for your valuable feedback.

We have decided to go for java, using Velocity indeed (our own framework 
is based on Velocity).

I entirely support the idea of having some working mechanism for 
ruby-java integration, even if not entirely mature.

Having precompiled binaries of ruby interpreter for several platforms is 
an issue that may have impacts on a future choice. Is there anything we 
can do for that, as a community?

Ciao, Giuliano


Piergiuliano Bossi wrote:
> We are on the way to start a new project, a web application with a bunch 
> of pages and the following features:
> *) users are maintained within a persistent repository (it could be as 
> easy as a yaml file, we are talking about no more than 10 users); first 
> page is a login page, of course
> *) through these pages (around 10, warning & error pages included) a 
> user can invoke a transaction on a legacy system ==> we already have 
> java code that encapsulate a transaction or we can rewrite it in ruby, 
> it is a simple text based protocol over sockets, just like a telnet session
> *) some transactions may not be invoked directly through the webapp, but 
> they are scheduled instead for late night execution; of course, we can 
> store these info in a yaml file too, there is no real need of a 
> relational db
> *) we are talking initially about 2-3 transactions per day (not very 
> hard, isnt'it?)
> 
> We have an (almost-)ready framework in java for building webapps. 
> Although that, we are asking ourselves if developing in ruby could be a 
> better choice, mainly in terms of development speed. Infact, having 
> around 2 or 3 transactions per day I don't think that application speed 
> really matters (as long as users will not complain). We are just ruby 
> newbies, but we like it. We are considering perl too, because in our 
> team there's a perl fan, sponsoring mason for this project.
> 
> We can develop:
> *) everything in java
> *) mix ruby (html-based frontend, maybe fastcgi or mod_ruby) and java 
> (transaction invocation)
> *) everything in ruby,
> *) mix perl and java (we have tried a 30' spike with Inline::Java, it 
> seems to work)
> *) everything in perl.
> 
> If we mix ruby & java I was thinking about using rjni or rjava.
> 
> One thing to take into account is that the application will be deployed 
> on a Sun cluster (5500, I guess) and I am not sure that the customer 
> will permit to compile the ruby interpreter there. They are quite 
> "conservative", if you know what I mean.
> I know that this depends on os version, but may I expect to find in any 
> "official" place an already compiled interpreter for Solaris /whatever/? 
> This thing may affect negatively the whole choice. Unfortunately the 
> customer is pretty rigid on things like that.
> 
> Apart from that, development speed is the most important thing in this 
> project: not very comfortable, but sometimes you have to do it. Even if, 
> or because of we are quite in a rush we follow an XP process, applying 
> the whole set of practices like TDD, continuous integration, small 
> releases, etc. We don't want just to hack some code together. We are 
> quite experienced in java, a lot less in ruby, and even less in perl, 
> but with the latter we have at least an experienced person.
> 
> I'm sharing this with you both for hearing your opinions and for letting 
> you understand which kind of silly things may encourage or prevent ruby 
> adoption.
> 
> Thanks!
> Giuliano
> 

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