I'm doing an experiment, developing an enterprise application in Java and Ruby in parallel, trying to evaluate whether Ruby is enterprise ready, or Java must still remain my weapon of choice.

Monday, October 30, 2006

String s = "Hello World!"; puts s

My name is Elad Kehat, and I'm a developer for a large ISV.

The name of this blog implies it's subject, so I'll go directly to trying to explain why this isn't YARJC:

  1. I recently started working on a completely new product, where I'm in charge of ther server side. I'm going to code it twice, in parallel - one time in Java and another in Ruby. So this isn't just a comparison based on the a posteriori implementation in Rails of an existing Java app.
  2. The product involves a rich client, built with Eclipse RCP. This is not a web application. In fact, we expect to invest 60%+ of the development effort on the client application. Client and server are going to communicate via SOAP.
  3. It's an enterprise application. That means that it'll have to scale, it'll be installed (if successful of course :) ) at many customer locations, support customizations by professional support, and it's likely to go through multiple versions, with new developers coming in and rapidly taking over.
  4. Also, an important part of the spec involves working closely with other products, some by my company, some 3rd party, most (if not all) are Java apps. Most of these products have open API via web services, so in principle we shouldn't care, but at least in one case there's also a RMI interface, which is vastly faster. We'll see.

That's about it for now. In the coming months I'm planning to blog on my progress. Hopefully this'll turn out to be a good reference case for other enterprise Java developers wondering if it's time to make the switch.

Oh, and I still need to explain my motives for doing this. I'll do that in the next post. Promise.

3 comments:

gderazon said...

If you want this experiment to succeed, you should try to be more objective.
You are too enthusiastic to show a Ruby win.


The power of an enterprise ready language is in the end; when you get to the stability, performance and maintainability issues.

Ruby might also win there but you should be more patient

Elad said...

Golan,

I absolutely agree on what makes a language enterprise ready, and that's exactly what I intend to test - this is why I'm doing this experiment and writing this blog.
However, I can't hide the fact that I'm enthusiastic, or that I really hope that Ruby is indeed enterprise ready. If I didn't, I wouldn't be doing this :)

Jatinder Singh said...

This is good stuff..I was really looking forward for such initiatives..I will hook on to your blog.