Ruby on Rails ready for business?

big enterprises not ready until there is vendor support (sales, support team)

we see larger and larger business use RoR (eg Intel, regional bank, waste mgmt); support is huge due diligence question; start using on least critical aps then move up the chain

Red Hat equivalent for RoR? IBM? 37signals w/ Amazon? MySQL supported by EMC – adjacent to Rails?

Rails is shipping in Leopard

Rails ready for business for large number of small business (the long tail!!)

On Microsoft’s radar… may see it as a successor of VB6?

Ruby w/ soft typing will create extra overhead in larger team (doesn’t force coding standards) – counterpoint: don’t need a large team for RoR (OPhoto/20 developers vs. Flickr/6)

Larger companies with larger teams may not have culture/politics suited for RoR – gives too much power to junior people

maybe it’s project size, not team size: more than 45k lines of code, somebody will start to re-factor, and soft typing may create risks (unless you diligently maintain your tests)

Spock received VC funding, VCs told them to use Java (no good reason). After a few protoypes VC convinced, use of RoR no longer an issue.

RoR may be enable tiny teams to build mature offering not requiring a lot of VC funding (and sell it on Ebay!!).

I am duplicating something that had been done by 25 people …. by myself!

Summary: enterprises and VC’s still reluctant, but we can do things with smaller teams, faster.

Reflections on the day – abstract from RoR

Refreshing was that there was high degree of “pessimism” (aka realism) about RoR (unexpectedly).

SpeedGeeking – exciting, exposure to many things.

RubyCOnf, RailsConf, RailsCamp …. community is astounding, openminded. Chunky Bacon (an uncomment).

Should we do it again? YES

Should we do two days? Hmm-Hmm

Level of contribution and input great – PRODUCTIVE TIME.

Would come for two days if there was more opportunity for learning,... maybe a bit more structure to session (eg. an endpoint). Maybe endpoints articulated ahead of time?

Unconference – the other view (3rd in two months): “it works”.

Example: somebody didn’t know whether to present, ended up presenting together with somebody else.

Out of towners: 2 days better (about 10 people) from out of town).

Proposals: two Fridays in a row, so you can work on your learnings from day one on day two.