This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz by Obie Fernandez. Original Post: ThoughtWorks on Rails, Enterprise Adoption 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?)

Joey DeVilla, "the accordion guy" wrote up copious notes about my talk. (Thank you, Joey!)

So my talk was indeed at a 10,000 foot level, on purpose. My main goal was to show our real-life people doing real Rails work in the enterprise, which I hope I accomplished.

Enterprise Adoption

Josh asked me today how to "sell RoR to teams that are used to working with Java/J2EE". The biggest challenge, in my opinion, is that lots of teams doing J2EE have people are used to thinking that quick == dirty. Martin's keynote had tons of good information for anyone wanting to evangelize Ruby as enabling quick and clean solutions, and well-written Rails applications are all about quick and clean. A good J2EE app is slow and clean, but most are slow and dirty (IMO). I think the hardest thing about convincing hardcore J2EE devs would be that a lot of those programmers actually get off on the complexity and building of framework upon framework. Most people I know doing Java are not application developers! They are programmers and they like working on plumbing! You're not going to be able to sell Ruby on Rails to those people (ever?), because Rails is primarily used to do front-end stuff, which they hate. Of course I'm generalizing, but for what it's worth tread lightly and take into account people's prejudices.

J2EE teams tend to be larger, due to the extra complexity. Big projects usually give individual members freedom to perform below their abilities and/or skate by working on pet projects and miscellaneous bullshit that does not add business value. Again, tread lightly in those situations because when you try to sell Ruby on Rails to those kind of people they are going to get very antsy. You will represent a very big threat to their happiness.

On the other hand, there are small teams out there doing Java and .NET that are committed to the success of their business and/or really can be considered application developers. Those folks should be very easy to move over to the Ruby camp. They will really appreciate the benefits and make the most of them.