Enterprise Architecture: From Incite comes Insight...: Certifying Ruby on Rails as being Enterprise Ready!

Sunday, November 12, 2006

Certifying Ruby on Rails as being Enterprise Ready!

The Ruby on Rails community is notorious for not reading but reading into my past blog entries. Figured I would outline the nine things the Ruby community needs to do in order to be truly deemed as enterprise worthy...

Of course folks will come out of the woodwork and debate what the word enterprise means. Hopefully we can get past this and focus on things the Ruby community needs to consider. Listed below are the nine things they need to get started on:

Embrace JRuby: This includes surpressing Ruby functionality that will not be compatible with JRuby (e.g. Forking, etc). The Java community dealt with this early in their lifecycle when MS introduced their own spin. Ruby on a Java VM will provide the scalability that enterprise applications require.

Industry Analysts: Get a large analyst firm such as Gartner or Forrester to start providing coverage of the Ruby community at large. I suspect if you make enough noise, they will pay attention.

Standards and Tools: Beyond the tool itself, figure out the equivalent support for things such as Ant, JUnit and other Java utilities. The notion of configuration and release management practices is vital for enterprise adoption.

Security: Figure out how to add in support for enterprise security and management functionality. Consider deep support for SNMP, XACML, CardSpace and SAML. Figure out ways to have mechanisms that support not only signing of code using PKI approaches but also embrace identity-based encryption.

Environments: The world runs more than just Intel and Windows. Consider ports to other operating systems such as Z/OS

Case Studies: If there is a Fortune 100 enterprise whose primary business model isn't technology, get them or an independent source such as an industry analyst firm to create a case study on their implementation. If they won't budge in terms of their media relations policy, send me their contact information and I will assist them in getting over this hurdle

Consulting Firms: Figure out a way to get other than basement type not worth talking about small consulting firms to blog on Ruby usage. The community should put a little effort into persuading large (10K plus) firms such as Accenture, Infosys, Wipro and others on the merit of using Ruby for their clients as the small guys aren't even on most enterprises radar and if they are, they usually are assigned to non mission-critical application development

Media Relations: The Ruby community needs a better face to media relations than David. Find someone with a background in IT across many different sizes of companies, business models, etc and turn them into the face. This person's first task after taking on this role should immediately ask the likes of Doc Searls, Jon Udell, Richard Stallman and others who already have capital in terms of enterprise mindshare to also start blogging on the merits of Ruby

Conferences: The Ruby community needs to stop solely speaking on Ruby at developer-oriented venues and start speaking in business-oriented venues. Software Development in the US is simply going offshore and you will be speaking to a shrinking marketshare. Instead focus on making sure your stories are being heard by CIOs and enterprise architects

If the community is savage in completing all of these tasks, the value of Ruby will become apparent to all without the need for certification. The real test though is whether folks will listen to friendly advice or simply resort to habits of throwing daggers that doesn't move the Ruby community forward...