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ERubyCon – Charles Nutter talks JRuby

I was at erubycon this weekend and it amazed me just how low the opinion of Java has fallen in the Ruby community.  Microsoft, by comparison, got off lightly with only a few Vista jabs.  They were kind (and wise) enough to weather these bumps in their own office space with good humor and grace.  Meanwhile Java was taking it in the gut all three days.

Somehow without word or warning, battle lines are forming in the sand.  Some Rubists new to the history of languages are painting Java as ‘your fathers language’ as if less than 10 years could separated generations across an insurmountable divide.  If only we had someone who could bridge this chasm and unite us.  Someone  who could defuse the fear, uncertainty and doubt about how Ruby can co-exist in our Java-vested Enterprise oligopoly.   It would also help if they were just the right kind of crazy to have fun while doing it.

Charles Oliver Nutter, JRuby engineer and recent Sun hire, clearly has his work ahead of him. He is the personification of the Man in the Middle, representing the Ruby community by working in the heart of the Java empire.  JRuby bridges the gap between Ruby and Java by finding common ground.  The JRuby compiler is a JVM interpreter for Ruby language allowing Ruby to be compiled into Java Bytecode and run on any JVM.  While I may have glossed over some of the sticker parts of the technical description, I was intentionally careful in not mentioning Java.  As Charles said in his erubycon talk, Java is just the bathwater; the Baby is the JVM.

HotSpot, Sun’s JVM is a marvel of engineering accomplishment.   Sun’s Just In Time compiler, fast memory allocation, and native fully parallel thread support are each billion dollar investments in Intellectual Property sitting on your server or desktop free for anyone to use.  The brilliance in JRuby is in recognizing the awesome possibilities of working with the JVM instead of demonizing it.  You can remain a pure Rubycolyte and work within the Enterprise because, as Charles said in his talk, he writes the Java code so that you don’t have to.

My personal impression of JRuby was very possitive.  We all know enterprises have Java running on their servers.  They understand Java Application Servers and trust them with a absolution that borders on faith.  When I learned from Charlie that Rails applications could be compiled into war files and distributed to my JBOSS Web Application cluster, I nearly sprained my jaw in agaped amazement.  This was the decoupling option I have been desparately looking for in Rails; Code separated from Implementation, Language separated from Infrastructure.

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Erubycon Day one – ELT's

First talk was Randal Thomas from Engine Yard on ETL (Extrac, Transform, Load) applications that all of us have been asked to write in the past.  These are those ‘quick, simple and one-use’ data parsing apps your accounting or HR or Business Analyst’s having been asking you about.   His point is that they are never quick, never simple and you end up running them every day for years until they are rewritten.

My personal experience with an ETL was from a telecom company I worked for that over night expanded from a rebrander to a provider. The million dollar software they bought to handled the per call billing didn’t have any way to parse the huge daily call logs coming in from carriers.  Thats what we call Enterprise!  So I whipped up a quick 40 lines of Perl code and some Bash duct tape that became the single interface to batch load the milliions of records worth hundreds of thousands of dollars daily.  And I was the Network Engineer at the time; the programmers were still working on an EJB config file to model the framework to set the display for an entry screen that would stub out the function that eventually would parse the call log.

Don’t get me wrong, Enterprise is not a four letter word (its clearly has ten letters) and Randall’s talk was on building ETLs grounded in reality.  First, be lazy.  Use google to see if someone already has done the hard work.  Second, realize that users will lie to you.  Expect to verify everything they tell you and don’t be surprised when it changes.  Business Rules are really business generalizations, and unconstant ones at that.  Use pipes when possible, chaining outputs from one application into inputs of another.  Expect to have to stop and start a process in the middle, and allow for that.  Learn SQL because there is no such thing as a perfect abstraction.  Also learn from Map Reduce and use it when needed