License 2 Code

The Twin Cities has a strong and active developer community for its size, so its no surprise that the Rails and Ruby community is strong. A solid Ruby user’s group, JRuby leads, and now, a raft of rails rockstars riffing on ruby (and rails).

Local Rubists have joined together to blog on Ruby and Rails at railspikes.com - “a group blog with a mix of how-tos, plugins, and posts about the business of Rails.”

Grails vs. Rails performance smackdown - round 1 goes to Grails. Sure there’s chatter about the preliminary nature of these results, admission that the tester really didn’t know how to tweak Rails, even an honest request for any help in improving the test. Well my one suggestion is - drop Rails. Read more »

I’m excited about JRuby for all the standard reasons, and the move of the JRuby team-leads to Sun is a great sign. But somethings been eating at me. Java has a language specification. Ruby does not. Java’s language specification opens the platform for some types of innovation/differentiation. Think Jikes.

Now back to JRuby. Ruby is covered by a significant amount of unit tests. The JRuby guys (Charles and Thomas) indicate that they have to reverse engineer a spec from the tests, and invoke a lot of brute force to get Ruby to run on the JVM. This seems problematic, but you could argue that once they get 100% test success, they’re good to go right?

I think you’d be wrong. What happens with the next version of Ruby? JRuby would be perpetually exposed to chasing the updates to Ruby. Do we expect Matz to keep JRuby in mind? I don’t think that’s entirely reasonable - not without a spec. Ruby is intended to be terse, elegant, convenient and powerful. Running on the JVM is not a core requirement.

I don’t think this spells doom, but my flag is raised, and I’d be curious to hear about how my analysis is incorrect, or what might be done (or is being done) to address this.

This week we’ve been inundated with talks at the CSS on LAMP and Rails. What our spies in the field are reporting is that Rails is fast replacing PHP in the coveted LAMP stack. Yes, this new stack is LAMR. But you probably knew that.

The Colorado Software Summit has a tradition called Q and A, where the entire attendee population gathers at the end of the day for a totally open-mike, free-for-all question and answer session. Its a great place to get a quick collective opinion, or hook up with an expert for a follow-up.

And sometimes is just great for lobbing some caustic bomb of a question. Like the Java v. Ruby/Rails question raised tonight… Read more »