- max

I’m admittedly a bit late catching this post.

Now that CF9 and open source Railo are available, I’d like to know if you have a different opinion of CFML or is it too late to turn back?

Long time no see! Hope all is well with you.

I got the impression that Grails was still pretty immature. I haven’t messed with it much, but LeGros was telling me the other day that they just announced their upcoming 1.0 release. Compare this to Rails, which has been massively popular and runs several large commercial web applications. I’m not much for hype, but I like what I’ve seen of Ruby and Rails, and have a pretty good feel for when it’s an appropriate implementation.

The gut feeling we had was that Grails would be well worth keeping an eye on, and an easier jump from a technology standpoint, but that Rails was more battle-tested at the present time.

Again, I’ll plead the fifth… I’ve been buried under build tools for the last month so I haven’t been able to do much research.

Have you had any experience with Groovy/Grails that you’d like to share?

I actually read Sean’s email this time and it looks like Matt is the one in Orlando. Sorry for the confusion. :)

Thanks for the link. I’ve gotten the impression from my JMS book that different JMS providers don’t play well together, so I’ll be interested to see what they have to say about Rails fitting in to this environment. Without having looked in to it too much yet, I was guessing that we’d simply expose an endpoint in Java and hand off to the Ruby implementation, or just use a RESTful or web service architecture with something like Mule providing the bridging.

Of course, CF plugs in just as neatly to an ESB, so I’m not surprised you are enjoying that. I imagine that if you’re using the same JMS provider inside your CF server as you are with the rest of your implementation, you can hook in to the event gateway and respond to JMS messages directly from CF.

How are you guys set up in your environment?

Thanks for your comments on your experiences and the link; I’ll check that out.

Regarding #4, we’re moving to an automated build process, where “build” is defined by the technology. So, for Ruby or CF, we’d probably be bundling up the artifcacts for deployment even if they don’t require compilation. The advantage of doing this in JRuby and/or CF is that with WAR-based deployment, we can bundle related Java libraries and have a pristine classpath for the application (i.e. independent of the classpaths on the other apps on the server).

Sean touched base and said you were going to be at BarCamp Orlando this weekend. I had a conflict so I couldn’t go (5 year anniversary with the girlfriend). If you’re local, you should hit up the Adogo user group on October 2nd and we can meet then.

To answer #1, I think the answer is yes. Depending on your ESB, there are most likely several ways to get data onto the bus – JMS, SOAP, http post, etc. This blog entry discusses (in the comments) using JMS as well as SOAP from Ruby:

http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2007/01/bringing_rails_to_the_enterpri_1.html

In my world, we’re still happily using ColdFusion with our ESB ;-)

1. Check out this post by Dave Thomas: http://pragdave.pragprog.com/pragdave/2007/03/the_radar_archi.html

2. Can’t speak to CF’s features, but RJS is quite nice.

3. If you’re using a service-bus architecture you may want to consider using a pure Rails deployment for the front-end, as opposed to JRuby. Either way Rails scales just like you would a Java or CF deployment.

4. Ruby code does not need to be compiled, thus “build” doesn’t really apply.

5. ?

6. Good/easy