Enterprise Rails
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. It has blown up and been discussed on just about every list, including Rails Oceania. 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 with good reason: Support. You can go to certified training courses and become a certified engineer, which makes hiring for these large corporates easy. There is also a a large number of consultants that have based their business models on these technologies. These guys know things like Tomcat and IIS – they don’t know (or care) about Mongrel or Lighttpd or even Apache.
Web 2.0 is not going to be around forever – regardless of whether you think the web-o-sphere is in a bubble at the moment, it will cycle at some point, and there is going to be a hell of a lot Rails developers out of jobs. Software-as-a-Service† will alleviate some of this, but there is one BIG area that has been ignored – and that is corporate and government applications. The beauty of targeting this audience is that it is big and constant – their will always be big business that need IT systems. There is a number of reasons why this segment has been ignored by Rails coders that Zed rattles off – issues with connecting to legacy databases, lack of LDAP/central login system access – but these are technical issues, which are easy for programmers to fix.
I think the bigger issue is the complexity culture of enterprise systems – DRY isn’t something is in their vocabularies, so we don’t like to talk to them, because it makes our lives harder, and they don’t want to talk to us, because they don’t think the systems we build will do what they are asking. Having said that, I’ve seen enough hacked up Access databases in government and the education system to realise that this is complexity, for complexity’s sake.
Things like JRuby and IronRuby are going to make the the integration side of things easier – now we need to start getting back in to the corporate space.
†SaaS is basically the same thing as ASP – ASP is what it was called during the last dot-com boom.