This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz by Eric Stewart. Original Post: Ruby in the Enterprise Feed Title: Ponderings On Ruby Feed URL: http://blog.eric-stewart.com/category/programming-ruby.rss Feed Description: This is the Ruby related section of Eric Stewart's weblog. These entries will be the commentary of a long time Java/C++ programmer that started exploring Ruby in 2003. Latest Ruby Buzz Posts Latest Ruby Buzz Posts by Eric Stewart Latest Posts From Ponderings On Ruby

Can Ruby be useful in the enterprise? Sure! Of course, that depends on what you’re considering it for, how you define Enterprise, and what day it is (the Ruby community is very active on many fronts, and support that was once lacking is rapidly growing in many areas).

I mostly stayed away from the whole James McGovern fracas recently, but since this was one of the blogs he sent a trackback to, I’ll add one little comment that I haven’t seen too many others express. Ruby was never too bothered about its lack of widespread public adoption in the enterprise. It is doing just fine being quite useful in all kinds of environments, meeting needs and providing an increasing number of developers another powerful way to please their customers and themselves. That being said, there are definitely inroads being made.

Consider the public positions of companies that make their living in the enterprise. For example, look at the position posted by MomentumSI. Jeff Schneider has linked to some analysis done by them recently on the applicability of Ruby in the enterprise. I know and have worked with many Momentum consultants over the years and they are very bright people who have a lot of experience in that arena. Of course, ThoughtWorks thinks pretty highly of Ruby too.

Ruby (and Rails) aren’t really striving to become the great enterprise platform. They are trying (and succeeding) to be great tools to help people get things done, be productive, and enjoy their work. I don’t think the community in general cares too much if they aren’t making great strides in the enterprise (even though I think we’ll see much higher adoption there). They are having too much fun using it to do things they are doing now. And as for wondering how Ruby will continue to grow, only time will tell.