Common Sense over Conservatism - Is Ruby on Rails ready for the enterprise?

This was a different type of talk from Dan North, who works for Thoughtworks in England. Dan was not keen at all on Powerpoint presentations, and worked off of what looked like a few scribbled notes in a diary.

Dan started by talking about what Ruby on Rails is and what it is good for. It is a set of packages, written in Ruby, that enable you to develop a database backed web application - very quickly, mainly because it uses Convention over Configuration and it is written in Ruby. Something that takes ten lines to write in java can only take one line in Ruby - that saves a lot of time.

Ruby on Rails scales really, well but in a different way to java apps. It works in the same way as a LAMP deployment - you only need loads of PC boxes behind an IP load-balancer instead of a big box made by sun or IBM, that has loads of memory and contains an app that creates threads by the thousand. Ruby on Rails works best for things like admin pages or reporting solutions where you only have a few users and the requirements change almost daily.

Rails is Ready - unfortunately the enterprise is not. Programming in a dynamic language is a totally different kettle of fish to programming in a statically typed language, like Java. For it to really take off, loads more Java programmers will have to go through the pain of learning Ruby and then organisations will have to be brave enough to try it out.

Dan was a very clever guy, who made a very good case - and he didn't try to sell me a book!