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Microsoft recently announced demos of two exciting Ruby on Rails developments. The first is a Silverlight application integrated with Ruby on Rails and the second is a demo of Microsoft's .NET Rails implementation, somewhat weirdly named "IronRuby."
IronRuby lets developers access all of their favorite .NET libraries through Rails, in keeping with the standard .NET practice of cross-language coding.
Microsoft developer John Lam maintains that Microsoft's implementation should be judged first and foremost by their results, which is good, because that's just how I was planning to judge it:
"I have always maintained that you must judge us based on our actions and not our words. Running Rails shows that we are serious when we say that we are going to create a Ruby that runs real Ruby programs. And there isn’t any a more real Ruby program than Rails. This demonstrates that we’re true to the language, and that we’ve put compatibility above all else on our TODO lists."
Lam also admits that IronRuby still needs work, especially in memory management:
"Our performance is nowhere near where we expect it to be, particularly in startup of a large application like Rails. We are consuming much more memory than we would like to. But this is the price you pay when you put compatibility ahead of all other work. We’ve shown that we are willing to do what it takes to run Rails. Now we have to do the work to make it run better, and faster."
It's very cool to see Microsoft engineers coming out from behind the Iron Curtain and talking this candidly about their upcoming projects. It's also exciting to see a big player like Microsoft finally taking Ruby and Rails seriously. If nothing else, Microsoft's foray into Ruby development and .NET support for the language is yet another sign of how successful and popular a language Ruby has become within the RIA community.
If you haven't dabbled in Rails, there are many great resources on the internet to get started. I'd recommend checking out Tony Hillerson's talk on The Flex Show about about Rails and Flex integration as well as Why's (Poingnant) Guide to Ruby, which is probably the most entertaining programming resource ever written. Seriously.
Have any more great Ruby on Rails resources? Link 'em up in the comments.
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I gave a talk about integrating Flex and Rails last week. Slides are here http://michaelmarth.blogspot.com/2008/05/flex-on-rails.html
Michael
IronRuby is the .NET "RUBY" language implementation, and the "weirdly" name cames from his "IronPython" related.
"If nothing else, Microsoft's foray into Rails development and .NET support for the Rails language is yet another sign of how successful and popular a language Ruby on Rails has become within the RIA community."
Ruby is the language, Rails is the framework. The above paragraph needs a little retouch so no one confuses the stack.
Thanks Chess - I actually updated this this morning when I was cleaning out another typo and realized it was confusing.
Eduardo - I think it's a weird name because they're both things we dig out of the earth, and no one would really want a ruby made out of iron. Think about how "Lead Diamond" or "Tin Sapphire" sounds. Thanks for the background though.
From what I understand after watching PDC videos from a few months ago, IronRuby has no relation to the Rails framework in any way. IronRuby is merely an open-source language implementation that runs off of the CLR (actually they created something called the DLR, or Dynamic Lanugage Runtime, so that other dynamic languages like IronPython could interact with statically typed languages native to .NET). I hear that Microsoft would like to bring Rails along, but is first focusing on Ruby.
As for the name, it was to follow the name chosen for IronPython. Straight from the Microsoft employee's mouth who has been overseeing the whole "bringing dynamic languages to .NET" project, the idea was that the language implementation was rock-solid or "iron-clad" in following the language spec. It is meant to convey that it is a true implementation of the Ruby language, with no modifications by Microsoft to make it work with the .NET framework. The Microsoft employee also said he would love to say that it is an acronym ("Implemenation Running On .NET"), but he just can't take credit for that being the original reasoning for the name. He also said he's a huge fan of IronChef on Food Network.
Here's the PDC session video that I watched from the guy that envisioned the whole DLR project (at about 14 mins in he talks about the "Iron" name):
http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/TL44/
You'll need to have Silverlight to stream it, or you can download it as .WMV or .MP4 file formats by clicking the "Downloads" link near the bottom.
Rails development and .NET support for the Rails language is yet another sign of how successful and popular a language Ruby on Rails has become within the RIA community."affordable diploma & get diploma Ruby is the language, Rails is the framework. The above paragraph needs a little retouch so no one confuses the stack.
The Microsoft employee also said he would love to say that it is an acronym ("Implemenation Running On .NET"), but he just can't take credit for that being the original reasoning for the name. He also said he's a huge fan of IronChef on Food Network.online Master Degree | distance learning high school you can download it as .WMV or .MP4 file formats by clicking the "Downloads" link near the bottom.