Ruby has entered the Enterprise thanks to the Enterprise gem | Hacker News Reader

Ruby has entered the Enterprise thanks to the Enterprise gem

github.com

110 pointsmosburger36 comments

The same thing happened to VisualWorks Smalltalk years ago. We reimplemented the "change log" to use XML, so we'd be buzzword compliant. Functionality gain: none. Result: embarrassing bugs in Smalltalk training class when I was demoing how you don't lose code even if your image crashes.

(We broke a very cool feature that had been working for decades, which is core to developers, just to be buzzword compliant!)

Now the title of Robert Martin's talk: "What Killed Smalltalk Could Kill Ruby Too" makes sense.. http://railsconf.blip.tv/file/2089545/

Yes, and it pains me to see you guys making the same mistakes. (Though, you have done some things really right!)

So did the new feature break the object reflection inside smalltalk image? I like to hear more details about this.

Nope. There was just a bug that broke the re-reading of the change log. It was fixed pretty quickly. But not before I had a chance to show a bunch of Smalltalk students VisualWorks flailing.

There's also acts_as_enterprisey, which has been around for a while now http://github.com/airblade/acts_as_enterprisey/tree/master

From the site:

Rails make life easy for us but -- and it's a big but -- we don't want it to look easy. acts_as_enterprisey is your friend.

How does acts_as_enterprisey make webapp development look hard? Well, the only way your client can judge your app is by playing around with it. What better gives the feeling of heavy weights being lifted behind the scenes than slow response times? Exactly. That's what acts_as_enterprisey does.

So while your client clicks, ...waits..., and then gets the page, you can blather on heroically about wrestling with clustered indexes, cache expiration strategies, n log n seek times, etc ad nauseam.

I think I enjoyed this the most:

"I’m sure you’re asking yourself, 'how much does this enterprise solution cost me?'. Well, like any good enterprise system, it is insanely expensive. This gem will cost you eleventy billion dollars payable to me, now."

According to my calculations a good enterprise solution costing eleventy billion dollars would require a fourty billion dollars annual support contract.

Don't forget a 90 billion dollar custom code fee!

Per module.

As we all know, XML is just another word for Productivity! One less thing to compile and throw those pesky errors before we put it straight into production.

I can't wait to show this to the IT guys... if they ever get back from their 4 hour lunch break.

Awesome mullet BTW!

What I'd really like, is a way to express xml in xml, so I can be super-productive all day long recursively writing a single xml document.

You want XSLT. ;-)

XPath is far too concise. It needs an XML encoding. Something like PMML, where math looks like

  <DefineFunction name="frob" optype="continuous"> 
    <ParameterField name="x" optype="continuous"/> 
    <Apply function="+">
      <FieldRef field="x"/>
      <Constant>42</Constant>
    </Apply>
  </DefineFunction>

I wish I were joking.

Content MathML to the rescue: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MathML#Content_MathML

that comment was gold

I think you'd also need a way to express that xml xml using xml as well.

XXMLML?

I'm sorry... it's not ready for the enterprise until there's a code generator that will automatically create the XML based on some existing COBOL code.

I don't trust this software much. Most enterprise software I've dealt with requires at least two paid consultants to install and configure. "gem install enterprise" ? Are you kidding? This is kids stuff. A few other concerns:

* No rea (Ruby Enterprise Application) objects? How do I package my software in to one file that I can upload through the enterprise application manager?

* Speaking of which, where is the enterprise application manager? I expect a buggy web app that only works on ie6 and requires 10+ activeX components.

This is a step in the right direction, but there is a long way to go.

A little late, though, as most of the "Enterprise" frameworks have started to shun XML configuration.

er i'm pretty sure this rubygem is poking fun at the "enterprise" and not a really for the enterprise

What I'm saying is that this would have been funny 3 years ago.

MY PROJECT IS NOT A JOKE. ;-)

Har har.

anyone who needs the above hint is clearly a true blue "enterprise" person.

He's right. It sounds to me like enterprise ruby needs more business analysis integration features for data mining and warehousing.

That's kind of funny, I actually just finished building a tool that lets you perform queries against the ruby AST. You can pattern match and process S-Expressions. It still needs a bit of polish, but it's pretty neat.

Check it out, SexpPath: https://github.com/adamsanderson/sexp_path/tree

HOLY SHIT! YAY!

I knew if I just waited long enough someone would finish this off for me! Wonderful!

What do you think about folding this into sexp_processor?

I should prolly actually ask this on github. I only read ycombinator for the enterprise post. :)

Send me an email or drop me a line on github.

Beautiful, I think you've just made my life a whole lot easier. I've been building a Ruby->Python compiler, Prooby ( http://github.com/daeken/Prooby/tree/master ), and that should make a lot of my code simpler.

Awesome, I'd love to see if it helps you out.

Cannot wait for the same thing for JavaScript.

finally!

Good joke, guy!

It looks like a joke.

Why bother HN readers?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com