Agylen

The now infamous post by James McGovern on Ruby’s lack of “enterprise” qualities sparked an interesting thread on the Rails mailing list.

The thread is interesting because it is strangely devoid of flames and name-calling and, apart from the usual FUD about Java being slow being spread by a few clueless people, quite informative. I particularly appreciated the posts by David Johnson.

One thing seems clear to me. In order to become more successful in the enterprise, Ruby needs to overcome some of its current limits, like the lack of serious internationalization and threading features and of a serious threading implementation.

It also seems clear that, contrary to what McGovern writes, Ruby is not a train wreck waiting to happen. If it’s currently lacking in some aspects, there’s no reason not to expect that it will get there, given enough time.

Some people however wondered whether it’s really a good thing for Ruby and Rails to become more “enterprisey” or rather if it would lose its simplicity and appeal by trying to go beyond simple database-backed web applications. To me this looks too limiting. My current approach, as I wrote before, is to try to make the Ruby and Java worlds go hand-in-hand together in harmony. Having Ruby running on the JVM thanks to JRuby might do much towards this, particularly if the objective of having Rails running on JRuby is as close as they say it is.

Technorati Tags: enterprisey, mcgovern, jruby.