May 08, 2009, 3:06 PM — Ruby on Rails is enterprise-ready. No joke.
Members of the core Rails development team, onstage Thursday for a question-and-answer session with the audience at the RailsConf 2009 conference in Las Vegas, were questioned about the enterprise worthiness of a planned upgrade to the platform.
[ Earlier this week, Rails founder David Heinemeier Hansson touted the framework's stability and responded to criticisms. ]
"Is Rails 3 finally going to be enterprise-ready," the audience member asked.
"I think Rails 2 has already proven to be enterprise-ready," said core team member Jeremy Kemper.
Core member Yehuda Katz responded, "A lot of enterprises use Rails 2, so it's not as if Rails is not usable." Rails has faced some criticism about whether it can sufficiently scale.
After the session, Katz said he believed the question to be a joke, not something of a serious vein.
"It was definitely something of a joke," he said. But there are things that could be considered to try to improve Rails adoption in the enterprise, such as enabling integration with the Hibernate object-relational mapping framework, Katz said.
Panelists also were questioned about how much JavaScript to use in Rails applications. Kemper advised that if a developer is doing a JavaScript-heavy application that the developer should learn JavaScript and learn to love it.
"JavaScript is not a bad language," Katz said. "There's definitely something to be said," for learning JavaScript as a language, he said.
David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Rails, said he has changed his position on JavaScript because of libraries that have emerged. "JavaScript four or five years ago was not the same JavaScript as today," he said.
Panelists were asked which framework they would use for development if Rails did not exist. "I probably wouldn't be doing Web programming," Heinemeier answered. He then acknowledged Django and Seaside as frameworks of interest.
