JavaWorld Forums: Your experience with JRuby?

Like the other poster, I haven't tried JRuby on Rails yet, but I have desperately tried to deploy real-world Rails apps, and let me tell you, it was a nightmare of glue-ware and bleeding edge this and that just to make it work. First there was Ruby version conflicts, then apache version conflicts, documentation version conflicts, then we needed some external load-balancing thing because the webbrick isn't really intended for prime-time and the apache-glue was crufty. Always something else not quite experimental version enough, which makes production engineers more than a little squeamish. And then there was the database efficiency and the memory leaks and ...

we abandoned the whole thing. our chief ruby-zealot resigned, and later spoke out on his blog about how Rails was a really good idea, and it is, no doubt about that, but how the implementation was so fatally flawed that he was embarking on a new alternative approach in his own startup.

So I'm a little hesitant to try it. It talks a good talk, but during that 10 months of getting nowhere we kept asking, "Has anyone actually deployed anything more than toys in Rails?" and we never got any answer. Some said Campfire but when we asked how many users it had, well, it was no Flickr, it wasn't even a Ryze.

We all really wanted it to work. Ruby syntax is a dream, Rails attempts to realize a noble goal, it all looks so good ... until you try to make it pay your bills. We all felt a little cheated, burned by hype, like there should be a README.LAST file in the docs that just says "Sucker!"

It is one thing to have all the buzzwords and be politically correct to the latest academic jargon, but it is quite another thing to have a web application that is buildable, robust, maintainable and at least a little future-proof; maybe it was just our bad karma, but Ruby itself proved to be none of these, and Rails even less so. Someday maybe, but today? not a chance.

There is a chance, though, that the robustness of Java's very mature and pro-quality network and DB code and the more sombre attitude of Sun engineers could just maybe make Ruby on Rails work, and if that's true, then hey, sign us up!

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