Can Ruby be considered an enterprise-grade language?

Question

Is the Ruby language, specially when used in the context of a framework like Ruby on Rails, ready for building large systems with complex business logic and advanced mechanisms, keeping its productivity edge and maintainability?

Can it replace Java EE?

Skim a partial list of people using Rails and gauge for yourself: http://rubyonrails.org/applications — sarnold, Jan 07 '12 at 00:24
@sarnold these seem to be essentially sites which are very content-oriented. Where are the CRM, financial services, resource-planning systems, for example? — Gonçalo Veiga, Jan 07 '12 at 00:36
think about this... Twitter is built using Ruby on Rails and it can handle a gazillion requests per nanosecond. — c0deNinja, Jan 07 '12 at 00:36
@Gonçalo: in my experience, the financial services industry says as little as possible about their tools because they're all convinced that they've got strategic advantages over every one else because of their secrets. :) — sarnold, Jan 07 '12 at 00:38
@c0deNinja - I think Twitter migrated/is migrating to Java and to a lesser extend Scala. — Arjan Tijms, Jan 13 '12 at 23:59

score 3 · Answer 1 · edited Jan 13 '12 at 23:59

This question is a bit subjective, and "replace Java EE" goes a little far, but you can certainly build scalable enterprise grade applications in Ruby on Rails.

My observation of the Ruby ecosystem, however, is that there are more platform dependencies that can trip you up and the variety of third party libraries to bring in complimentary functionality may not be as wide as you would get in Java.

On the other hand, the gems infrastructure is pretty neat and line-for-line you will get more function out of less actual code in ruby.

Finally, and this may matter as you need to scale up a team, I think it is easier to find experienced Java EE devs than it is to find experienced Rails devs.

Can Ruby be considered an enterprise-grade language?

1 Answers1