This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz by David Heinemeier Hansson. Original Post: Ruby on Rails at Amazon Feed Title: Loud Thinking Feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/LoudThinking Feed Description: All about the full-stack, web-framework Rails for Ruby and on putting it to good effect with Basecamp Latest Ruby Buzz Posts Latest Ruby Buzz Posts by David Heinemeier Hansson Latest Posts From Loud Thinking

I had a great time talking about Ruby on Rails at the annual Amazon Developers Conference in Seattle this week. I was surprised to learn how many departments inside Amazon are already using Rails for various systems and delighted by the open-minded responses from those that weren't already doing Rails.

Amazon has historically been mostly a Perl-shop at the front end, so Ruby is not that big of a leap. Especially not for the groups that are interested in getting better object-oriented techniques and patterns like MVC going. And with the low confidence in Perl 6 ever panning out, I certainly felt an interest in exploring alternatives.

They already embrace diversity big time. Most of the back-end systems are done in C/C++ and some in Java. Most of the front-ends are done in Perl/Mason. And on top of that there's a variety of smaller systems in most any language. It's very decentralized with different groups responsible for different services that are then weaved together to produce the final pages.

Many thanks to my guides, all the nice Amazonians that I had chats with, and to Jonathan Swartz (the creator of Mason) for entertaining thoughts on how Rails could fit into their production systems. Good times indeed!