Investigating RubyWorks
May 29, 2007I was reading on DHH’s blog that more than 40% of ThoughtWorks new projects are in Ruby. This is exciting, because getting both Ruby and Rails into big business environments will go a long way towards both the legitimacy of Ruby and helping ease the pain of being stuck in a Java monoculture.
Digging around the ThoughtWorks site led me to their RubyWorks page and the associated rubyforge project. My first reaction was pure excitement. In a nutshell RubyWorks is Ruby, Rails, Mongrel, and a few other tools bundled into a single package, with some magic to configure everything out of the box.
Supplying a supported one-click install for RHEL and Cent OS is exactly what is needed to help get Ruby into big business. If you’ve never worked in an “Enterprise” environment before, it has everything to do with support contracts and using software that been around long enough that all the gotchas and pitfalls are publicly known.
(Believe it or not, being “Enterprise ready” rarely has anything to do with performance and well written software. I’ve seen J2EE web apps in production that are so far away from good programming practices that the mind boggles.)
I’m excited to see what the ThoughtWorks guys can do with Ruby, Rails, and JRuby this summer. The faster Ruby gets established in big business the better.