This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz by Obie Fernandez. Original Post: JRuby like Mac on Intel? Feed Title: Obie On Rails (Has It Been 9 Years Already?) Feed URL: http://jroller.com/obie/feed/entries/rss Feed Description: Obie Fernandez talks about life as a technologist, mostly as ramblings about software development and consulting. Nowadays it's pretty much all about Ruby and Ruby on Rails. Latest Ruby Buzz Posts Latest Ruby Buzz Posts by Obie Fernandez Latest Posts From Obie On Rails (Has It Been 9 Years Already?)

Until perhaps a month ago, my teammate Jay specialized in .NET and would never have dreamt of buying an Apple computer, despite his fondness for Ruby. You see, ThoughtWorks could send him back to doing .NET when our project ended and he would need his trusty DELL running WinXP.

That was the case until we got on the subject of whether or not Windows XP can run on the new MacBook Pros that feature Intel CPUs. Schubert and I told him about BootCamp and we speculated that he could run a VisualStudio.NET development environment on a Macbook if he needed to do so. All of a sudden, the perceived risk of plunking down a few thousand on a Mac dropped dramatically, so Jay bought one.

Realistically, is Jay going to ever go through the trouble of booting WinXP on his Macbook? I'm speculating that he will not. He's not the type to do that sort of thing just for fun. Would he have bought a Mac if it didn't have the ability to boot WinXP? No way, I don't think he would have. Does it make logical sense? Not really, but that is human psychology for you.

I happened across some blogger asking why you would ever want to run Rails on a JVM. It's a valid question, which sounds to me much like the question "why would you ever want to run Windows on a Mac?"

Sure, there are some valid reasons like connecting to JMS and leveraging the JVM's threading model, but the truth is that Rails development on the trusty old 1.8 series C-based Ruby interpreter works just fine for 90% of the enterprise apps out there. Do enterprise bosses understand or believe that? Nope. No way.

IT departments that do heavy Java probably discourage use of Ruby in some fashion or another. This presents quite a bit of risk for developers in those departments wanting to learn Rails and use it on the job.

Enter JRuby, particularly JRuby on Rails, and the situation changes, much like when we found out that we could run WinXP on Mactel. The perceived risk lessens. It's easier to justify learning Rails or convincing your boss to allow you to use Rails on the job when you also tell him that we will be able to deploy those Rails apps on an approved enterprise platform - the tipping point!

With the advent of RubyCLR, we might even be able to run Rails apps natively on .NET. At that point, you could say with great emphasis on the irony of the statement, that Rails apps are "write once, run anywhere". There is nothing that PHB's salivate over more than "plaform-independence".

Basically, I"m saying that I suspect that developments in JRuby and RubyCLR will help regular Ruby adoption in the enterprise tremendously.