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Rails in the Enterprise
written by Steven Bristol on August 3rd, 2009
We have a client who, although I can’t say their name, is a billion dollar company with offices around the world. I was speaking to the head of application development last week and heard some very encouraging news about Rails in their enterprise: They have around 100 apps in production, all for internal use. Of these 16 are Rails apps and the rest are Java. They receive about 1800 application support calls each month. Of these an average of 6 are for the Rails applications, the rest are for the Java apps. They employ 40 support people who are dedicated to the Java applications and zero for the Rails applications. I was astounded. What’s your best Rails/Enterprise story or statistic?
18 Responses to “Rails in the Enterprise”
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I don’t have those kinds of stats to show, but we’re working on new features for the first Rails app for a DoD agency. Originally, we were brought in to do UI design mockups but because the technology was not yet chosen I built the app in Rails. We did not just do mockups, but a working and tested app.
Typically these projects run with a few developers and managers, but with Rails, we had a working prototype with 1 resource (and some support from another developer toward the end of the project).
Interesting statistics. I would think that when a company is transitioning to a new architecture they would choose the smaller, less intense applications to migrate first. I left a global company with a very large number of Java applications in their inventory. There were several people in the enterprise who wanted to migrate to Rails, but the large majority of Java developers had no desire to learn something new… how lame. I know of no large company’s who have made the move to Rails from .NET or Java. It’s great to hear that some company’s are make the switch. With reduced time to market desired for most corporate systems, Rails will definitely provide the needed boost. I would think that getting them to move to JRuby would be the easiest because they could leverage their existing deployment infrastructure.
I utilize a Rails app that I developed for 2 major hospital corporations. I don’t have the stats, but I can tell you that it has nominal support/downtime issues compared to other “more enterprise” applications in use.
I utilize a Rails app that I developed for 2 major hospital corporations. I don’t have the stats, but I can tell you that it has nominal support/downtime issues compared to other “more enterprise” applications in use.
I utilize a Rails app that I developed for 2 major hospital corporations. I don’t have the stats, but I can tell you that it has nominal support/downtime issues compared to other “more enterprise” applications in use.
Awesome and encouraging :)
We’ve got numerous big enterprise customers at Engine Yard (also, who can’t be named, for the most part) and they all really love Rails. We hear stories similar to this one all the time.
They usually start with one app
- generally something a particularly enthusiastic developer insisted on as a test run -but once that’s up and running, it seems to infect everyone else and spread from there.Rails is infectious—it’s 16/100 today, but check back again in a year ;)
We have a client whose app is used simultaneously by 30 people for 11 hours a day, 6 days a week, does over 8GB of traffic a day just internally, and automates pretty much anything requiring physical paper.
The app was developed, and is maintained, by one person.
They receive about 1800 application support calls each month. Of these an average of 6 are for the Rails applications, the rest are for the Java apps.
That sounds impressive. But it can be misleading. Once upon a time a team rolled out a poorly written application to integrate financial data.
Six months later their manager stood up at the all-hands meeting and claimed success. Because
“Support calls have dropped to zero in the last three months.”
At which my boss stood up and said
“That’s because the users gave up calling. They already know what they’ll be told: restart the application and try again.”
The problems had not vanished because the application had gotten better – the users had learned that when it crashed – which it did with dismaying regularity – the only thing they could do was restart and try it again.
At Inkling we host an app that helps groups of people with decision making. You can imagine, large groups of people often need the most help in group decision making, so large enterprises have been the majority of our customers. One of my favorite Rails+enterprisy stories I got is that we have Rails+Ruby doing SAML 2.0 authentication:
http://blog.inklingmarkets.com/2008/12/inkling-with-saml-20-single-sign-on.html
I really need to commit to getting some of my fixes to the saml2ruby stuff up on github. But just know if anyone is asking you about getting your Rails app doing enterprise single sign on with SAML, it is indeed possible and not crazy difficult.
Two comments:
First, why do these companies not want their names mentioned? Is there an obvious reason I’m missing? It would be great for Rails in the enterprise if we weren’t speaking in ambiguities.
Second, if you’re interested in Rails in the enterprise, you should be at eRubyCon this weekend! http://erubycon.com
I work in a lots-of-billions-of-dollars global company. We have our own in-house intranet “cloud” that offers good ol’ Java/Struts and Rails as options. Not sure how much takeup there is on the Rails front, but I’ve been running our departmental MIS app on it for over a year now.
I know who this customer is :)
There’s one major barrier to Rails being widely adopted in the enterprise. As an enterprise consultant for the last 8 years, I know that if Rails were to make any type of splash it needs an Application Container that runs in one of the big 4 app servers. (IIS, WebSphere, Weblogic, Oracle App Server).
Who ever develops that app container could make themselves alot of money IMO.
Great Post !
@Adam MacDonald Deploying a Rails app into a Java Application Server is a breeze with jruby. Just use warbler and transfer the war into the web directory. It’s working fine and it’s getting even better with every jruby version. I’ll promise that will become more and more popular !
We did WellCare’s website with Rails – and it was a struggle to get the .Net-centric environment to flex just enough to let us do simple things like migrations, or use Subversion instead of Team Foundation Server. It worked out in the end, though, and we accomplished more than we could have in a different framework. WellCare’s site is a true enterprise app too, with a web services tier, multiple databases, etc. Our biggest hiccup during development? A rogue load balancer.
Completely useless statistics out of context.
+1 Adam MacDonald
this is exactly what i hear from people all the time where i work. we’re primarily a .net shop with me being the only coldfusiion developer. the only reason we went with coldfusion so long ago is because it has excellent integration with microsoft technologies like iis and ldap. it’s easy to install, maintain and completely transparent.
if rails wants wide spread adoption the only way it will get it is by becoming as transparent as coldfusion is with windows. as much as rails people don’t want to admit it, enterprises run on windows, so you can either fight it or embrace it.
shamless plug: http://cfwheels.com
Just for the record, this is more of an anecdote than any sort of statistical analysis of anything.
In 2007-2008 I worked for a large company that had hired me to deal with a large Java web app that they had done with outsourced development from India. 10 developers in Bangalore, had worked for a year, and built a 40,000 LOC app that barely functioned in IE6 (and not at all in any other browser). With two guys in NYC and two from Hashrocket, we recreated the existing app in 10 weeks, and then went on to build out new features. Management was impressed. And then we all got laid off when the economy tanked. :-o
In 2007-2008 I worked for a large company that had hired me to deal with a large Java web app that they had done with outsourced development from India. 10 developers in Bangalore, had worked for a year, and built a 40,000 LOC app that barely functioned in IE6 (and not at all in any other browser). With two guys in NYC and two from Hashrocket, we recreated the existing app in 10 weeks, and then went on to build out new features. Management was impressed. And then we all got laid off when the economy tanked. :-o