Anyone who has been following my blog, probably knows that I have been working on some PoC work with Buildr at my office. Well when it came down to it, my boss and I decided that Buildr just isn’t quite ready for our office. After we came to the sad realization that I wouldn’t be able to use this opportunity to inject some Ruby love into my workplace, we got to talking about Ruby as a language.
Max, my boss, is very open to trying new languages and/or techniques in the office, but he does so in a much more cautious way than I would. I imagine this is because he is responsible for the entire department, while I am responsible for… just keeping my job. That being said, he told me if there was a prooof of concept that could be done to try out Ruby or in our case JRuby on Rails he would be open to the opportunity.
Well lucky for me that same day a project came across my radar, that was just that. We needed a quick site to test a potential business plan, and my initial reaction was, “hack it up in ColdFusion”. But as I told Max and Brian, while sitting on my thinking chair, I put two and two together, and got….Marvelous Ruby love. So on Thursday I pitched the idea that we use this quick and dirty project to test out JRuby in our environment. The project fits perfectly because we already told “the business” that whatever we do is just a proof of concept, so if their model works phase II of the project will have to invest time in doing it “right”. So if we find out the JRuby on Rails isn’t for us then we simply fall back to standard Coldfusion with Fusebox 5 practices and hook into whatever Java libraries we previously were using.
Let this be a lesson to all you Ruby hopefuls out there. At some point your boss will give into a PoC in hopes that you will fail misserably and stop talking about it because you are too embarrassed to bring it up anymore, so you can proove to him that Ruby is a much better language than ColdFusion.
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