FiveRuns Blog

Welcome to Round 3 of Rails TakeFive, FiveRuns’ ongoing series of insight and commentary from notable members of the Ruby and Rails community.

This week, we’re happy to have Peter Cooper, editor of the popular Ruby news blog Ruby Inside, share his views on Ruby and Rails.

FiveRuns: Welcome, Peter. What was your first experience with Ruby and/or Rails and how did it come about?

Peter Cooper: I was a Perl developer for 8 years, from 1996 to 2004, and randomly stumbled across Rails when it was mentioned by someone’s blog in October 2004. I took a quick look at it and was impressed with how it was presented, but knew I didn’t want to learn another programming language. I decided to try and implement my own Rails-a-like in Perl, and while I managed to develop a whole app on my ersatz Rails, it was a mess.

I gave Rails a proper try in November 2004 on a client project, while promising to myself not to bother to learn Ruby itself. I ended up completing the client app within merely a few hours, as opposed to the day or two it’d have taken with Perl. Of course, I was blown away by both Ruby and Rails, got involved with the then-nascent community (this was a big reason I stuck with Ruby), and the rest is history!

FiveRuns: What do you think about Curt Hibbs’ opinion that by running Ruby under the ever-present JVM it is now much easier to sneak Ruby into companies through the back door, especially since Ruby can call and inherit Java (and vice versa)?

Peter Cooper: I agree with him. I’ve been shocked quite a few times over the last several days at how little flexibility there is in the average enterprise environment to deploy or work with technologies that aren’t “officially” sanctioned by the company. Some companies even outsource significant parts of their infrastructure, and technology decisions are tightly bound to their suppliers.

Given that typically the application stacks used in most enterprises are either Microsoft / .Net bound or Java bound, it makes sense to capitalize on the amazing advances of JRuby to roll out Ruby and Rails applications in the enterprise via the “back door.” This is also useful in order to take advantage of existing SSO (Single Sign On) libraries and APIs which are easily accessed via Java. I also think that if a rock solid .Net implementation of Ruby comes along, that’ll open even more doors.

FiveRuns: What do you think about the progress JRuby is making? Is this going to increase adoption with more mainstream developers?

Peter Cooper: I have a lot of admiration for JRuby. As the first alternative Ruby implementation that reliably runs most Ruby applications, the team behind it deserve a lot of credit for pulling off a major feat. 2007 was a mega year for JRuby, with it being relatively unusable, in a production sense, at the start of the year, but by the end of the year it was running pretty much everything you could throw at it. Lately the team seems to have been focusing on the compilation side of things, with Ruby code being compiled to Java bytecode, and the performance increases from that are pretty impressive.

I haven’t seen any significant evidence of adoption by mainstream developers yet, but I think the people who stand to gain the most from JRuby are working behind closed doors in the enterprise or as consultants to enterprise customers. JRuby doesn’t yet present any compelling reasons to use the Java platform to most mainstream developers, especially if they have no background with Java. Java applications have many of the same deployment issues as existing Ruby applications, so I think people would rather focus on pure Ruby in the mainstream market.

FiveRuns: What is the coolest and/or most innovative Rails project that you have seen in recent memory?

Peter Cooper: It’s not fully publicly released just yet, but the concept behind Heroku is quite powerful. It’s a system that lets you create, develop, and run Rails applications using an entirely Web-based interface. I think we’re a year or two off of seeing some really powerful, yet easy to use, systems that allow regular folks to quickly build applications to do things they need, but the thinking behind Heroku is a good start. The future is in easily self-developed, remotely hosted networked applications, and Heroku is leading in that field when it comes to using Rails.

FiveRuns: Where do you go for Rails-related news and insight – any particular website, blogs, forums, etc. that are of particular value?

Peter Cooper: As the editor of Ruby Inside, the most popular Ruby news blog, my answer might seem obvious, but perhaps I should explain where I actually find the news that eventually gets covered there. One great resource is del.icio.us, the tagged link repository. If you go to http://del.icio.us/popular/ruby or http://del.icio.us/popular/rails, you can see the most popular Ruby and Rails related links as saved by del.icio.us users in the last day or two.

As well as del.icio.us, DZone.com, the “Digg for developers”, has a strong Ruby section that people submit stories to. It is also worth keeping an eye on Planet Ruby on Rails to get an unfiltered look at the Ruby and Rails blogosphere. Despite all of the irrelevant content you’ll see there, you’ll also pick out quite a few previously unseen gems.

Peter Cooper is an England-based developer and serial entrepreneur with diverse interests across the worlds of technology and open source. He’s the editor of Ruby Inside, the most popular Ruby news blog, as well as the creator of Snippets, now owned by DZone. His web site is at http://www.petercooper.co.uk/.