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PrintRuby, Rails and Corporate Perception
Yesterday, a well respected architect/colleague of mine where I work (a pretty big IT company) said, "Rails is only good for small departmental web applications." And made plenty of inferences that J2EE was the only valid solution for "enterprise" IT systems.
I won't bore you with the long conversation that followed (and he could have just been pushing my buttons...)
I would just like to point out that Ruby On Rails currently has a perception problem.
The fact that I invested my time to co-author an article about Ansuz: A CMS that Works for the now defunct http://advent2008.hackruby.com/ site seems to reinforce my colleague's opinion.
I didn't care for the site name to begin with ..."hackruby.com"
I chose Ruby and Rails because of their technical merits. I use Ruby on Rails to build business applications...not to hack around.
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Log in to leave a comment or Create an accounttkadom writes:
relevant post http://java.dzone.com/news/interview-switching-java-ruby
samsm writes:
Sometimes people are skeptical of a new way of doing things without also being critical of their current way of doing things. A combination of those two perspectives is the only way to honestly assess something. Doing the first without the second is essentially taking the nearest excuse not to try something new.
Vague disapproval, like "not ready for enterprise" rings of excuse rather than honest assessment. People who actually try things tend to have more specific complaints.
I'm not sure what there is to be done on the PR front ... people who try things are going to come to their own conclusions and people who are searching for an excuse are going to find it no matter how much better a technology may be.
It's the excuse person with the perception problem, and it's probably not limited to Rails. Where else have they been making excuses? It brings their whole philosophy on work, politics, and life into question. This is a battle between skepticism and denial we all have to fight in every aspect of our lives.
tkadom writes:
Lex,
I do feel a bit of sorrow for the J2EE guys. I have run into plenty of folks who express a similar sentiment to what you posted, and while there is always a marginal edge case argument that proves their point, I can not help but to lump these poor folks in with the guys that were clinging to mainframes and claiming that enterprises would never move to unix! (see COBOL never being replaced by C, and C++ never being replaced by Java as additional references)
The biggest thing I have noticed is that companies are no longer tolerant of the 3-6 month lifecycles for a software development project. Agile development and instant gratification rule the development roost these days.
There are already several large enterprises using rails, so rails is tested in the enterprise, and appears to be rapidly gaining adoption. Adoption is driven by business owners who marvel at 6 month software development timelines that result in products which are 6 months behind what the company needs at the moment. they see these "enterprise" applications as tremendous investments and wonder why the 1 month project that was just rolled out by the RAILS team is missing.
While rails certainly has its problems, and ruby certainly has performance limitations, remember that web sites are primarily network and database bound. I would like to know how a network and database bound app is hampered by being implemented in ruby...
The case for using Java in a Web Application is diminishing on a daily basis.
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