A big day for Rails

I feel that yesterday was a BIG day for Rails. To say it with the words of ThoughtWorker Jon Tirsen:

We had a problem…and the solution is JRuby.

ThoughtWorks will adopt jruby as the deploy platform for their Mingle enterprise project management platform.

The problem was that most of their clients have well established IT infrastructures which cannot be changed so easily to accommodate a new stack. But Mingle is built with Rails, allowing them a huge productivity.

The dichotomy between the scarce client willingness to add new (different, unknown) blocks to their infrastructure and the power of the new tools (specially the ease of development) is something that anyone doing contract-development work faces.

Sometimes the clients don’t give a damn about the technology used, other times they can be pushed to change but most of the time we are required to used the already established technologies (at a higher cost).

Being able to run on a JVM, will remove many obstacles to the enterprise adoption of Ruby and Rails, and having a ThoughWorks backing this solution in production will raise the awareness that this is a feasible.

technorati tags:rails, thoughtworks, jruby, mingle