With the erubycon quickly approaching, I have sent a list of 5 questions to several of the erubycon speakers. As their responses come back to me, I’ll publish them here.

Enjoy!

—Jim Weirich

Zak Mandhro Answers

Zak Mandhro is a Senior Manager of Information Management Solutions for BearingPoint (http://www.bearingpoint.com). He is the first of our erubycon speaker interviews.

Q: Tell me a little about your background, where you are working and how did you come to start using Ruby?

I am a Senior Manager at BearingPoint, a global consulting company. My background is custom Enterprise Solutions that utilize JavaEE, .NET, SOA, Portals and Business Intelligence. I came across Ruby while exploring dynamic languages in 2004. I started using Ruby actively after Rails 1.0 release (outside of BearingPoint). We are currently using Ruby for a requirements DSL (http://rubyforge.org/projects/rdil) at a major federal client.

Q: What unique opportunities do you see for Ruby in the enterprise?

Short answer: The bottom-line is richer application at lower cost with faster time-to-market. At the moment, I see two areas where Ruby and Ruby on Rails are particularly attractive. (1) Building departmental database-driven applications, the type that are being serviced by VB, Access and ColdFusion today, and (2) Web services and SOA glue code.

The long answer is here: http://www.sdtimes.com/printArticle/column-20070101-01.html

Q: What obstacles do you see to getting Ruby used more in enterprise software?

We need to have a better deployment and infrastructure story for Rails. Unlike the shared hosting and VPS market, terms like monit, lighty, mongrel and fastcgi are alien to Enterprise data centers. There’s isn’t much in the “Enterprise”-press that would give these products credibility, let alone coverage. Lack of management tools is another area of improvement. We need to get to a point where systems integrators and IT infrastructure staff are familiar and comfortable with Rails deployment. JRuby WAR deployments is one way to get there.

Q: Play oracle for a moment and tell me what you see as the next “Big Thing” in software development.

I think we are already in the midst of the next big thing. “Simplification of Enterprise Software”. Complex and high-priced proprietary Enterprise software will slowly but surely start to lose market share to simpler open-source alternatives. We are seeing a move to openness and simplicity with JavaEE. We are witnessing endorsement of dynamic languages (less code). Over the next 12 to 24 months, we’ll see more simpler alternatives pop-up, mature and become pervasive; hopefully without ending up becoming just as complex.

Q: What erubycon talk are you most interested in hearing?

Must I choose? Here are three quick picks (in no order):

- Security (CAS and OpenID)

- Mingle: Full-scale JRuby

- Keeping Tests Dry

Thank You

Thanks Zak. Folks can get more information about erubycon at erubycon.com.