Ruby and Microsoft
Microsoft just held their 2008 "MVP Global Summit" in Redmond last week. This is an internal conference where they recognize awardees in a number of divisions and have over 400 technical sessions on a variety of topics.
The interesting bit for me is that Jamie Cannon reports that there's an informal meeting of Microsoft Rubyists going on at the event. They're planning to discuss IronRuby, open source, and other topics.
Wow, Ruby is definitely getting some love lately. I'm excited about that because OpenLogic has been a heavy user of Ruby, Rails, JRuby, and related projects for almost a year now. The more people use it, the better it gets. Once an open source project hits critical mass, it really takes off.
Speaking of which, I think JRuby will start to hit its stride this summer if they really do concentrate on Rails performance next as Ola Bini suggests. I'm very much looking forward to having the option to deploy our OpenLogic Exchange (OLEX) on JRuby. Mongrel is great, don't get me wrong, but I've always been a little suspicious of server processes that need to be monitored and restarted so frequently. Call me crazy.
As we're on the topic of alternative Ruby implementations, I'm anxiously awaiting the first releases of IronRuby. Will it really be the JRuby of the .NET world? Will it be fast, reliable, scalable, and fully-compliant? I sure hope so. It would be great to have yet another deployment option even though I'd like to standardize on a JVM if I have a choice.
With Microsoft's growing interest in the world of open source and some internal Ruby programmers, I tend to think they'll get there. Perhaps JRuby will have some real competition on Windows next year.
