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Ruby one-liners get answered

rubymegyarshThe guys over at Rails Envy, a Ruby on Rails enthusiast podcast, have a running joke.  Their catch phrase? – ‘Rails can’t scale.’ Yeah, I wasn’t too sure I got the joke either.  Then I heard it myself in CIO level discussions from smart business people parroting things they didn’t understand and read somewhere once in an article in a magazine bylined by a guy in a suit who looked corporate and trustworthy.  Rational reasoning and discourse can sometimes be co opted by bumper-sticker wisdom even at the highest levels.

Here is the thing about corporations; enterprises are in the business of managing calculated risk within the market or industry they operate.  They do this by forcing non-core operations to be conservative, risk-adverse and predictable.  It’s a bit like hedging your business’s bet in the junk bond market (core business) by backing it with rock solid, non sexy T-Bills (non-core like software development).  Sure, the return on the T-Bills is lousy but you know in three years you won’t be out that investment.  Java, backed by Sun Microsystems, and .Net, backed by Microsoft, are some of the blue chip securities of the programming world.  Enterprises trust them.  One-liners like ‘Rails can’t scale’ are the one-handed brushoff of entrenched corporate IT’ers to the mere idea of using something new like Ruby or Rails.

Still, Ruby is a persistent pitch man, especially in the web technologies.

Corporate IT: Ruby uses green threads and Rails is single threaded, why are we even talking?

Ruby: Ruby’s MRI is green threaded, but the JRuby interpreter uses native threads in the JVM, just like Java.  Also, Rails 2.2 just released 2.2 RC1 that is thread safe.  Merb was thread safe from the start and just released 1.0 RC2.

Corporate IT: There aren’t enough ruby programmers to staff a project.

Ruby: The Rails Rumble contest didn’t have any problems finding entrants.  Five hundred programmers just gave up a weekend to write 248,000 lines of code. Teams up to four completed 131 different Rails projects in under 48 hours, so you can see just how productive a small group can be in Ruby.

Corporate IT: Sorry but we need dependable database connectivity, not this serial locking business.

Ruby: So pooled connections in jruby and Rails 2.2 scratch that itch?

Corporate IT: There still isn’t a big company backing it so no support.  No support, no chance bub!

Ruby: Have you ever actually called Microsoft about a .Net problem?  Or maybe Sun to support your Java app?  Maybe you have, or at the very least arranged a support contract with a .Net or Java consulting company.  Try instead one of the fine Ruby consulting companies like EdgeCase, HashRocket or ThoughtWorks.  Sun already bankrolls the JRuby guys and for the Softies out there, Microsoft is putting its wallet behind Ruby on the CLR.

Corporate IT: Books?

Ruby: New one every day.

Corporate IT: You’ll get me to use some text editor in place of my IDE when Heck freezes over.

Ruby: Not a problem.  NetBeans guy, Eclipse, or IntelliJ?

Corporate IT: Yeah, okay, you win.  Now can I have that stack of waterfall project specs back, they were holding up the table at that end.

Ruby: Have you ever considered Agile?

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Photo attributed to Megyarsh @ Flickr CC

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Ruby Hoedown – What isn't a Cloud

Robert Dempsey has an excellent talk up on Confreaks where he looks at the Ruby language accessing Cloud computing.  As Robert knows, Standard Operating Procedure for a high level talk is to define the terms for the audience.  For this group the term ‘Ruby’ was a given, so he wisely focused on the Cloud.  Lemme recap what he lists as NOT being a Cloud if…

  • You cannot buy it with your personal credit card
  • They are trying to sell you hardware
  • There is no API
  • You need to rearchitect your system for it
  • it takes more than 10 minutes to provision
  • you need to specify the number of machines you want up front
  • you own all the hardware

This, in my opinion, is an excellent primer for evaluating that ‘Try our new Cloud Computing Service’ pitch your VAR is feeding you.  I can only add one point of my own, as in my mind it is not Cloud Computing if…

  • The the business model hinges on lock-in

Value Added Networks (VANs) can have a cloud-like smell to them when they branch beyond simple traffic passing and on into backend processing, but I have difficulty reconciling the lock-in potential.  If you cannot shift your system to a new Cloud provider easily, then I believe you are dealing with an entirely different animal.  Buyer Be Ware.

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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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