David Heinemeier Hansson quite rightly critiques James McGovern’s anti Enterprise Ruby article.
To say that Ruby and Rails are not for the Enterprise is like saying that PHP, Perl, Common Lisp, Smalltalk, etc. are not ready for the Enterprise. What ever happened to thinking about using the right tool for each job? Factors influencing “what is the right tool?” decision certainly include:
- Existing knowledge and experience in your organization
- Runtime efficiency and reliability
- Time required for Development
- Effects on maintenance costs
- Existing software libraries and infrastructure software
- etc.
Don’t get me wrong: I love server side Java for solving many different types of problems, but lighter weight (often scripting) languages and platforms also have their uses and there are many types of problems that are better solved with Rails than some subset of J2EE.
So take McGovern’s $500 for charity!
Greetings Isaac,
Perhaps his skepticism is warranted – but, I think that Ruby has momentum, and Ruby and Rails are good technologies for many problems, small enterprise, large enterprise, whatever. It took a long time for Java to be accepted as a standard playform, so let’s give Rails a chance – see what happens.
I still love Java for many server side applications, but I think that Ruby fits in nicely for many web applications and web services projects.
I definitely do not believe in a ‘one tools fits all applications’ phylosophy.
-Mark