InfoQ

InfoQ

Presentation

My Bookmarks

Login or Register to enable bookmarks for unlimited time.

The content has been bookmarked!

There was an error bookmarking this content! Please retry.

Recorded at:
Recorded at

Three Years of Real-World Ruby

Presented by Martin Fowler on Jul 12, 2009 Length 00:59:07
Sections
Process & Practices,
Architecture & Design,
Development
Topics
Java ,
Agile Techniques ,
Performance & Scalability ,
Dynamic Languages ,
Ruby ,
Domain Specific Languages ,
JRuby ,
Language ,
Ruby on Rails
Tags
DSLs ,
Mingle ,
QCon ,
Scalability ,
Ruby on Rails ,
ThoughtWorks ,
QCon London 2009 ,
Rails ,
Performance Tuning ,
JRuby ,
Testing
The next QCon is in London March 5-9, Join us!
 

How would you like to view the presentation?

In case you are having issues watching this video, please follow these simple steps to help us investigate the issue:
1. Right click on the video player and select Copy log
2. Paste the copied information in an email to video-issue@infoq.com (clicking this link will fill in the default details in most email clients).
Note: in case your email client hasn't automatically picked up the email subject, please include in your email the URL of the video too.
3. Done.
We will investigate the issue and get back to you as soon as possible. Thanks for helping us improve our site!
Summary
Martin Fowler talks about ThoughtWorks's experience with using Ruby on client projects for the past three years, and the creation of a Ruby-based product 'Mingle'.

Bio
Martin Fowler is an author, speaker, consultant and general loud-mouth on software development. He's the Chief Scientist at ThoughtWorks - an international application development company, and has written five books on software development and also writes articles regularly on http://www.martinfowler.com/ .

About the conference
QCon is a conference that is organized by the community, for the community.The result is a high quality conference experience where a tremendous amount of attention and investment has gone into having the best content on the most important topics presented by the leaders in our community. QCon is designed with the technical depth and enterprise focus of interest to technical team leads, architects, and project managers.

12 comments

Watch Thread Reply

Text article available by Martin Fowler Posted
Re: Text article available by andrew mcveigh Posted
Re: Text article available by Martin Fowler Posted
Not working by Michael Furtak Posted
Re: Not working by melih birim Posted
Re: Not working by Floyd Marinescu Posted
Nice talk ... but by Ali Motaz Posted
Re: Nice talk ... but by Martin Fowler Posted
Re: Nice talk ... but by Jim Riley Posted
"Is Ruby Slow?" by Lavir the Whiolet Posted
A few more qs. by Manoj Waikar Posted
Re: A few more qs. by Rodrigo Piovezan Posted
  1. Back to top

    Text article available

    by Martin Fowler

    If you can't stand listening to me droning - you can read the article of the talk.

  2. Back to top

    Re: Text article available

    by andrew mcveigh

    Martin,

    Has there been any sampling on whether the use of ruby is more advantageous in the creation/early stages of a project, relative to the later maintenance and upgrade phases?

    Andrew

  3. Back to top

    Not working

    by Michael Furtak

    I am unable to get the video to play on Win XP, Firefox 3.5. It works in Chrome and Safari, FWIW.

  4. Back to top

    Re: Not working

    by melih birim

    I have updated my firefox to 3.5 and video is also not working in my browser.

  5. Back to top

    Nice talk ... but

    by Ali Motaz

    First I would like to say that this was a nice talk and
    that I enjoyed it greatly!



    Martin presented his ideas clearly, and in case you never heard of him before
    he is a UML and Agility hotshot, in a good way!



    41 Ruby project by a reputable company is something any new technology can aspire

    for, definitely good PR for Ruby and Rails



    But the funny thing is, and if you think like I do, the bad things about Ruby,
    which Martin highlighted in the talk are really, really, really terrible.



    1. Ruby have a bad implementation.

    Whats news to me was that Matz according to Martin doesn't have the skill to change this!



    2. Ruby is slow.

    But what you can read through the lines is , ThoughtWorks is trapped with 41, its a little too late to turn back to something else.
    And the excuse that it's ok for a program to perform bad if it was written quickly seem hard to swallow.
    OCaml at least one choice that offer high level abstraction and good performance.



    3. He says that the bottle neck is the DB, and that they don't have the skills to fix this.

    In many ways, Martin really admitted this in his talk, to defend Ruby's slowness he suggest that the problem and bottle neck are normally elsewhere like in the DB, and then he goes to say that mingle is slow! Which just means they don't know how to write fast DB applications, which is weird!



    4. We deliver slow application to our customers! And they don't mind.

    Presumably because they are delivered fast! Well, all I can think of is, they got lucky booking customers who are not demanding!
    Personally I never met a customer who like slow application!



    I do notice that number 3 and 4 and not really about Ruby, but what I am thinking is that they used Ruby to deliver these bad things. And they are tolerating it because of Ruby. Which at least fro me creates a bad association



    Finally, all I wonna say is, after this talk, you might feel not so enthusiastic about Ruby.


    Would not it have been better if he explained how he created fast performing application, and how his customers live the speed. And how speed in doing things changes perspectives and potential.


    But he didn't, because they didn't!

  6. Back to top

    Re: Text article available

    by Martin Fowler

    I haven't done any sampling on that. I recall Mingle people saying that they certainly slowed, but were still faster.

  7. Back to top

    Re: Nice talk ... but

    by Martin Fowler

    In any application speed is a feature, but not the only feature that counts. After all I can write a really, really fast program if it doesn't have to do anything! So speed is something you trade-off versus other things.


    On most of our applications the DB is the bottle neck, so Ruby's slowness isn't important. Mingle is an exception, but in that case they feel that rapid feature delivery is worth the need for more hardware.

  8. Back to top

    Re: Not working

    by Floyd Marinescu

    This bug cropped up last week with all InfoQ videos and we are working to troubleshoot it. Some users have reported greater success in the meantime with IE (gulp). Floyd

  9. Back to top

    Re: Nice talk ... but

    by Jim Riley

    A consulting company may do one or two projects when evaluating new technology. The fact that ThoughtWorks has done 41 projects (and counting) is an indication that this technology provides value to ThoughtWorks and their clients.

    Ruby/Rails may not be the perfect fit for all projects and teams. I think the presentation provides provides good information for determining where, who and how to apply Ruby/Rails.

  10. Back to top

    "Is Ruby Slow?"

    by Lavir the Whiolet

    Is Ruby really slow? Have people tried Rubinius? Or other "performance-oriented" Ruby virtual machines?

  11. Back to top

    A few more qs.

    by Manoj Waikar

    I have a few more questions for you -

    (1) Does the increasing popularity and maturing of languages like Clojure, change anything for your company's approach towards Ruby (because Ruby is slow)?
    (2) Do you foresee TW using Lisp or Clojure or say, some of the functional languages in the near future?

  12. Back to top

    Re: A few more qs.

    by Rodrigo Piovezan

    So these seem to be the main issues identified when developing with Ruby on Rails: getting Active Directory (the built-in ORM) working with unit tests, more complex deployment mechanics, catching up with the platform's (particularly Rails) frequent updates, and, naturally, the Ruby/RoR learning curve.



    The fact that Ruby on Rails has been indicated as a more productive environment than usual choices such as JEE or .NET in three years worth of projects, despite these issues, is certainly a great thing. It is difficult to see Ruby's slowness as an issue, since even Java was once like that, and look at how influent Java is in the enterprise market nowadays.



    Regarding the learning curve, you mentioned that the teams were slow at the beginning (as expected with any new technology). Progressing through the "Improvement Ravine" had a relationship with their background on other scripting/dynamic languages and also with achieving the right attitude towards meta-programming. Perhaps I just didn't understand all the gathered data, but I could not visualize how steep this learning curve is. I think it would be really useful if you could provide some kind of feedback on this, and how it affected the teams' productivity at the early stages, this way people could have more realistic expectations on the outcome of adopting these technologies. How long until a JEE or .NET team can become productive on RoR?

Educational Content

Beauty Is in the Eye of the Beholder

Alex Papadimoulis discusses ugly code, where it comes from, how to avoid it, and how to get rid of it.

Architecting Visa for Massive Scale and Continuous Innovation

John Davies examines Visa’s architecture and shows how enterprises have architected complex integrations incorporating Hadoop, memcached, Ruby on Rails, and others to deliver innovative solutions.

Max Protect: Scalability and Caching at ESPN.com

Sean Comerford unveils ESPN.com’s architecture, what components are used and why, and the current changes the website goes through.

The Seven Deadly Sins of Enterprise Agile Adoption

Are there repeated patterns of failure on Enterprise Agile Enablement efforts? Sanjiv and Arlen discuss Seven Deadly Sins to avoid when adopting Agile in an enterprise.

Questions for an Enterprise Architect

Erik Dörnenburg answers: What is Enterprise and Evolutionary Architecture?, discussing 4 issues: Turning strategy into execution, Ensuring conformance, Where do the architects sit? Buying or building?

Wrap Your SQL Head Around Riak MapReduce

Sean Cribbs explains what Map-Reduce and Riak are, why and how to use Map-Reduce with Riak, and how to convert SQL queries into their Map-Reduce equivalents.

Polyglot Persistence for Java Developers - Moving Out of the Relational Comfort Zone

Chris Richardson shows how he ported a relational database to three NoSQL data stores: Redis, Cassandra and MongoDB.

The Golden Circle – Why How What

Jean Tabaka challenges the audience to reflect on what Agile practices they are employing, how they are using them, ending with the questions “Why have their organization chosen to go Agile?