Friday, November 23, 2007

Oracle Mix Proving JRuby is "The Best Way"?

I have a tendency to post intentionally inflammatory posts that usually end up evenly divided between "yea" and "nay". But this time, I've got Rich Manalang's post from the JRuby on Rails front lines to back me up.

Rich is one of the primaries (Rich: THE primary?) behind Oracle's new Mix site, the first highly-visible public site based on JRuby on Rails. And after the experience he's convinced that JRuby is "the best way" to deploy Rails.

Read the whole article, but I think Rich's final paragraph sums it up pretty well:
This was an amazing project to be a part of. And one thing I’ll say is that for anyone working in a Java EE environment where you have to use the stack that’s there, the future is bright and it’s all because of jRuby, Rails, and the speed and agility at which you can build applications on that framework. I’m convinced that jRuby is [the] best way to deploy a Rails app if you need performance and flexibility. My prediction: next year will be the year for jRuby’s rise into the mainstream.

3 comments:

  1. I couldn't agree more, but it's worth noting that Rich's post also included what is definitely _the_ major pain point for me with JRoR: start up time.

    In mixed mode development (which is unavoidable for us) you end up bouncing the JVM fairly often and the resulting speed bump really sucks.

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  2. The "start up time" for JRuby on an application server is irrelevant versus the months it takes the typical IT operation to deploy anything, Ruby, JRuby or otherwise.

    Ruby on Rails and JRuby on application servers are pushing the envelope on development speeds. The startup problem is a nit, the deployment problem will kill IT as we know it. Enterprise IT will die when they can't keep up.

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  3. Funny to see an effort like Oracle Mix from the same company ready to pay billions for BEA and their heavy middleware. What happens when corporations find out they can replace all there "Enterprise" middleware junk with light weight and cheap (as in cost) frameworks such as JRuby.

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