Component Workshop Ltd

We have written our latest business package, BrightSpark, in Ruby. This isn't much of a departure for us because we have quite a few Ruby on Rails projects in our portfolio, including CodeSpaces which is by far and away our largest Rails projects. However, it is the first time we have written a complete business package designed for deployment on our customers' servers in Rails.

One of the influencing factors in our decision to go this way was the ever-maturing JRuby. JRuby provides a wonderful bridge between Ruby and Java, and this opens up certain enterprise opportunities.

In our experience, Ruby gets a lot of of attention from forward thinking developers in enterprise environments, but it rarely gets any real traction. This is often down to lack of familiarity, or the perception that it is not a seriously supported language. Java, of course, is at the complete opposite end of the spectrum. Merging the two makes a lot of sense.

You would be amazed at how fast we can prototype new web applications in Rails. What would take several weeks of effort by a small team can often be accomplished in a few days with Rails. Not because it is magic, but because it is pefectly designed to enable rapid development of data driven web applications. This alone makes it a worthwhile tool for enterprise development teams -- even if it is only ever used as a prototype tool, being able to get ideas in to software form rapidly would positively affect the outcome of many projects.

So what's planned for JRuby.com? Well, as part of our work preparing BrightSpark for easy installtion, we're packaging a complete JRuby server stack. This will include an application/web server (Tomcat, Glassfish or TorqueBox), a database (MySQL, Postgresql) or adapters for commercial databases (SQLServer, Oracle, DB2) and an app store style deployment system for distributing applications (we've currently prepared two free applications; WikiWikiNoteBook and WikiWikiTaskList -- these are available as stand-alone Rails apps in our Labs section of the website).

We're also recording training videos and writing guides that help .NET and Java developers get up to speed on Rails fast. Any competent developer could learn Rails in little over a week, and with the right kind of help it could be even quicker.

This is all planned to arrive some time around the end of September. We're a small ISV, and we have a couple of other projects on the go so this date might slip a little, but we're really keen to get this started and make it a genuinely useful resource.