Clever::Tagline::Pending

Developing using Rails has largely been good but I just can’t stand the dog that’s WeBrick. As I use a Windows development machine at work, WeBrick performance has been terrible for me. On average, it takes between 30 seconds to 1 and a half a minutes for a request to complete when I test my application on development mode.

Which totally sucks the energy out of me after about…oh….1 hour.

So, I was a little skeptical when Mongrel was released by Zed Shaw. It’s in the same vein as WeBrick in that it’s a ruby implementation. But its calling card is its speed compared to WeBrick, the initial benchmarks conducted by Zed showed that it is several magnitudes faster than Webrick.

With Mongrel 0.3.11, Win32 services support is pretty sweet and I’m able to run the same application in either ‘development’ or ‘production’ mode without having to modify any configuration file.

Taking it for a initial speed test on my laptop just made me a Mongrel fan, response times for requests are SO MUCH faster than before.

James McGovern, self-confessed Enterprise Architect and Thought Leader, states that Ruby is simply not ready for the enterprise. In his somewhat entertaining post, he gives more emphasis on the cultural aspect of software development. As expected, there has been a rash of responses to this:

• David H. H [Boy, is James McGovern enterprise or what!]
• Dare Obasanjo [My Website is Bigger Than Your Enterprise]
• Anne 2.0 [When Fundamentalists Meet: 37Signals vs. McGovern]
• Coté [McGovern Comes out Swingin' on Ruby in the Enterprise]

In McGovern’s post, he states that cultural factors play a bigger part in the development process than technical issues and as he so eloquently put it, “An idiot with a tool is still a fool”. While he may have well made one valid point about needing “established” research firms like Forrester or Gartner show some love to Ruby in order to get the PHBs in the enterprise to start noticing it, I take issue with the rest.

What peeved me the most about the post was that McGovern claimed that there were no good books on Ruby and that they touched only on the simplistic aspects of software design. Excuse me, James…would something like Enterprise Integration with Ruby interest you? Or how about the Pickaxe?

RTFB, McGovern.

Tim O’Reilly writes that sales for Ruby books have increased a mind-blowing 1552% over the last 2 years while Python managed an jump of around 20% in the same period. What’s particularly significant is that the big spike in the sales graph for Ruby occurred slightly after the time Ruby on Rails hit the mainstream. Tim postulates that RoR has been the primary driving force behind the meteoric rise of Ruby among developers/geeks and I fully agree with him.

I think part of the reason for the mass adoption as put across by a comment, rightfully pointed out the influence Martin Fowler, Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas have on the general programmer populace. Not to take anything away from either Ruby or RoR, the mindshare that these 3 Agile Leaders command is quite considerable. After all, I was intrigued enough by Fowler’s lovenotes for Ruby to check it out.

After getting my copies of Programming Ruby and Agile Web Development with Rails, I had to put off reading them until after my semester examinations. This’ll probably qualify me as a geek more than anything but I had that funny feeling about not being able to read them. It’s similar to having [ice-cream/juicy steak/insert your favourite food] right in front of you but for some reason or other, you just can’t savour it. Man, I gotta get me a social life….

In any case, I’ve went through the 1st edition of Programming Ruby in its online form but I wasn’t able to really get into it. The dead tree edition, however, is another story altogether. It’s hefty and it packs much more than its predecessor. I’ve read the 1st 4 chapters and my general impression is rather positive, the book uses a conversational style and sneaks in some Dilbert-esque humor along the way. Much like The Pragmatic Programmer.