Tell me more ×
Programmers Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for professional programmers interested in conceptual questions about software development. It's 100% free, no registration required.
up vote 2 down vote favorite

After Heroku acquisition by SalesForce, is there any chance for Ruby being adopted in enterprise development?
If you know any good examples already, please point to them.

share|improve this question
Shotgun, which is widely used by animation studios, is Ruby. – user16764 Jul 23 '12 at 19:25

closed as not constructive by Thomas Owens♦ Feb 18 at 0:46

As it currently stands, this question is not a good fit for our Q&A format. We expect answers to be supported by facts, references, or specific expertise, but this question will likely solicit debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion. If you feel that this question can be improved and possibly reopened, see the FAQ for guidance.

5 Answers

up vote 6 down vote accepted

Ruby is a great language to hack together quick solutions, so it will be a part of a lot of people's toolkits. There is unlikely a Ruby 2 Enterprise Edition but developers and sysadmins working for enterprises will be using Ruby. People may even be using it in tools without being particularly aware that they are doing so.

Ultimately, when it comes to software for the enterprise, the language it is written in is among the least important things on the list. Enterprises want software that works well for them. If that is written in Ruby then great. If not, then great. Why would that specific implementation detail be important to them?

Edit: I only thought of this later, but one thing Ruby does really well is implementing DSLs, which are something that will perhaps increasingly be used in the Enterprise as people start to appreciate what you can do with them. So perhaps in that respect it will become more popular.

share|improve this answer
Agree, but also enterprises are quite conservative. Thats why I pointed to Heroku's acquisition. This is first time is hear about huge enterprise interested in Ruby. – Alexey Anufriyev Dec 21 '10 at 12:19
1  
It'll depend on the app. Some Enterprises have a single monolithic app, others have widely distributed components talking to each other. Ruby (IMO of course) doesn't seem to scale as well as some of the other languages out there, so it probably will make more inroads in the more distributed environments. – Brian Knoblauch Dec 21 '10 at 15:17
1  
My experience of Ruby's scalability is similar to yours. However the old adage about processor cycles vs developer cycles remains accurate and I have only once run into a hard barrier there, when I was dealing with very large datasets and really needed to drop to a lower level to do that processing. – glenatron Dec 21 '10 at 15:30
up vote 2 down vote

Well we have 5000 employees Use normally zOS DB2 Websphere and the whole IBM stack. But we integrate the Big Blue zOS over cics via simple REST in the WEB world. Even the IBM consultants wondered how easy it was. And we use : JRuby. It works great. Performance Critical things we integrate with Java And we are at the moment integrating MessageQueuing with Java, JRuby also to other platforms. Other project (java SOA BPMN only to set some keywords) suffer in the grows of complexity. One thing people often forget : You need 5 years to get a J2EE developer but only one year to become from mainframe developer to ruby on rails dev. So what was the question Ruby is not enterprise ready ?

Cheers

share|improve this answer
up vote 1 down vote

the number of gems in RubyGems become greater than number of module in CPAM

Ruby is use on a lot of product about cloud system like puppet or Chef. Ruby is already in enterprise.

share|improve this answer
What about transactions, WS-* and etc? – Alexey Anufriyev Dec 21 '10 at 10:57
No, they don't: modernperlbooks.com/mt/2010/12/counting-modules.html – phaylon Dec 21 '10 at 14:17
up vote 1 down vote

Java and C# are great for enterprise. All about structure, interoperability, doing everything for everyone completely.

Ruby, and particularly RoR is built with the intent of writing web applications.

I have built enterprise apps in Java, and web apps in Java, and web apps in Ruby on Rails. But I don't see most real "enterprises" (big companies) having the kind of mindset needed to adopt some of the rather heretical notions of languages like Ruby.

Yet.

share|improve this answer
2  
Ruby was not built with the intent of writing web applications. – Lukas Stejskal Aug 13 '11 at 12:08
up vote 1 down vote

Well I am more of a Python guy but I keep an eye in Ruby just because important people in the software industry keeps talking really nice about it: Martin Fowler, Kent Beck, Dave Thomas, Chad Fowler...

share|improve this answer

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.