JRuby buzz

I wish I could put "Jython buzz" as the title of my post, but unfortunately I can't seem to detect any Jython buzz anywhere. JRuby though seems to generate a lot of it, judging by this InfoQ article on Mingle, a commercial application based on JRuby and created by ThoughtWorks Studios.

One thing I found very interesting in the InfoQ article was that ThoughtWorks preferred to develop Mingle with JRuby (which is the JVM-based version of Ruby) over writing it on top of Ruby on Rails. They cite ease of deployment as a factor in favor of JRuby:

"In particular, the deployment story for Ruby on Rails applications is still significantly more complex than it should be. This is fine for a hosted application where the deployment platform is in full control of a single company, but Mingle isn't going to be just hosted. Not only is it going to need to scale ‘up’ to the sizes of Twitter (okay, that's wishful thinking and maybe it won't need to scale that much) but it's also going to need to scale ‘down’ to maybe a simple Windows XP machine with just a gig of RAM. On top of that, it's going to be installed by someone who doesn't understand anything about Ruby on Rails deployment and, well, possibly not much about deployment either."

They continue by saying that their large commercial customers wanted to be able to deploy Mingle by dropping a Java .war file under any of the popular Java application servers.

So, for all the talk about Ruby on Rails and the similarly hot Python frameworks, Java and J2EE are far from dead.

Here's wishing that Jython will start generating the same amount of buzz.