Ruby daddy Matsumoto joins Heroku Rails crusade

The Register ^ | 12 July 2011 | Cade Metz

[Cronos]

Ruby creator Yukihiro Matsumoto has joined Heroku, the San Francisco outfit that cut its teeth with an online service for building, deploying, and readily scaling Ruby on Rails applications.

In recent weeks, Heroku's "cloud" service has expanded beyond Rails to Node.js and Clojure and it intends to embrace additional languages as well, but the Matsumoto hire shows that the Saleforce.com-owned outfit is still very much a Ruby shop. Its "platform cloud" was originally built to ease the deployment of applications in a way that mirrored the effect Rails had on how the company's founders built applications.

"Discovering Rails was one of the big motivators for us – it really sped up development compared to other languages. At one point, the average project took us maybe two months to crank out, but when we switched to Rails, the time dropped to two or three weeks," cofounder Adam Wiggins recently told The Register.

"But the time to deploy didn't change. It's one thing when you spend two months building an app and a month getting it deployed into production. But when you speed three weeks building it and a month getting it into production, things seemed completely out of whack."

[Cronos]

I'm just toying with Ruby and it looks a lot neater than Perl (I'm not really into web stuff -- more a dwh guy) -- has anyone played with these two and Python? Comments?

[Mr. K]

What is Ruby?

Is it a scripting language?

Not like C# or anything? What kind of applications can you build with it?

Can it core a apple?

[rpierce]

Ruby is an open-source, object-oriented, interpreted programming language. It has its strengths (many) and weaknesses (few) but overall is a beautiful and enjoyable language to use. It's perhaps best known for being the language behind the Ruby on Rails open-source web framework that vastly decreases the time and headache of creating web applications.

Heroku is a very cool service that allows you to easily deploy a Rails application into the real world (something that until recently was not the easiest thing to do). The only issue I have with Heroku is that while you can get up and running for free. The next step in pricing and capability is a large one. Things can get expensive very fast with them.

Hope this helps.