Bungee Connect
I went to a breakfast this week hosted by Bungee Labs, the creators of Bungee Connect, a cool technology that combines web development environment over the web, cloud computing, and some interesting stateful components. They were looking for feedback and I provided some from the perspective of the Ruby community as folows:
Ruby and EC2:
There is a simple Ruby library that lets you easily work with the EC2 API: http://amazon-ec2.rubyforge.org/
A company I’ve been talking with and keeping my eye on is RightScale, that provides some powerful wrappers around Amazon’s web services: http://info.rightscale.com/
Ruby and IDEs:
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2007/11/26/Ruby-Tool-Survey
About 1050 use Textmate, emacs, or vi/vim. About 350 use an IDE.
Online Ruby IDE:
Bungee connect is ahead of Heroku: http://heroku.com/
Ruby popularity:
http://www.tiobe.com/index.htm?tiobe_index
#9 at 3%, the fastest growing general purpose programming language. My guess is it will get to about 5% by next year when you launch, putting it on equal-or-greater footing than C# (.NET), Perl, and Python, and almost on par with PHP.
Rubinius, the new Ruby virtual machine that takes many ideas from the Smalltalk-80 architecture and Squeak:
http://rubini.us/ … This is a very important project, in my opinion. It will make Ruby faster for one, but more importantly, it gets Ruby developers more comfortable with the underlying implementation of the language. It also gets us closer to what Seaside is doing…
Seaside, which I mentioned as a potential competitor to Bungee Connect:
http://www.seaside.st/ … This uses stateful components in ways that remind me of Bungee Connect. I think if you read comments by the creator, Avi Bryant, you’ll see some similarities:
http://www.caboo.se/articles/2007/4/8/heresy-and-turtles-all-the-way-down-with-avi-bryant
Having said that, the Rails approach is not, and will not be following that path. Listen to these comments from DHH, the creator of Rails:
“I’m not of the opinion development of web applications would be bliss if only it was more like desktop applications. Including the focus on stateful components.
I don’t accept the assumption that all web developers really want to be desktop developers and that all web applications would be better if only they were more like their desktop counterparts. I love working with the web as it is. I love the architectural patterns offered by HTTP and REST.
So in many ways, I see chasing a desktop-like view of the web as chasing the past, not the future. Dividing different architectural styles into past/future doesn’t seem to be a terribly helpful tool for evaluating their usefulness.
But sure, there’s a certain class of applications that undoubtedly fit better with a desktop-like approach and will benefit from an application framework that tries to bring that feeling to the web. I don’t see it being all that prevalent, though.”
So, what he is saying is that Rails will never be like Bungee Connect or Seaside. However, I believe with the advent of Rubinius, someone will be making a Ruby version of Seaside in 2008.
