We have just made an announced the second Ruby on Rails Oceania Perth meet up
Ruby on Rails User Group Perth second edition: 24 Apr 2008 at 5:30 until about 7:30 at the Level 2, 90 King St Perth WA
If you are a Perth rubyist, it would be great to see you there, we are going to have talks this time around — I may even speak about OAuth
See you then
Anyone in the Rails community would have read Zed Shaw’s rant about Rails. For those of you who don’t know Zed, he wrote Mongrel, which is the default web server library used in Rails, and which coincidently powers 88 Miles. It has blown up and been discussed on just about every rails list around. I’m not going to discuss what he said, or his tone, as it has been done to death, and he seems like the type of guy that you need to know to understand where he is coming from.
What did hit home from me was what he said out enterprise Rails. To frame this correctly, have a listen to the first half of this podcast from RailsConf.
As a rubyist, I could never understand why projects like JRuby or IronRuby existed. Why would you want to run another language in a different virtual machine? After reading and listening to Zed, the answer is obvious - integration for enterprise. If you look at existing enterprise systems they will run on technologies such as Java and ASP.NET and as a result, prefer to use things like Tomcat and IIS - they don’t know (or care) about Mongrel or Lighttpd or even Apache in many cases.
So take the easy and speed of development of Rails and put it into an environment that has traditionally been in the realm of complex systems that are hard to maintain and hard to use. Instead of worrying about writing XML configuration files, developers can spend more time making sure their apps are easy to use
I've been playing around with IronRuby a little lately, and am planning on trying out JRuby just to see how it is all going to fit together — and I have to admit, I'm getting pretty excited about having a truely cross server language that will be easy to deploy and maintain.
