We don’t often write about specific technologies here at Bust Out, as we tend to be fairly agnostic and pragmatic about such matters, but we recently sent a contingent off to Portland, OR to attend RailsConf 2007 and we are feeling pretty darn excited about the Rails framework and its future.

What’s the cause of this excitement?

Rails, or Rails adoption rather, is maturing, as was evidenced by the number of talks at RailsConf dealing with what we’ll call “big application” issues, such as server virtualization, scalability “without bounds” and large-scale caching. It was great listening to developers who are pushing the framework into new territory and are devising interesting and creative solutions to resolve whatever performance or scalability issues they run into. It was also interesting to hear how many times Erlang was mentioned during these talks as a very scalable, high performance language that can be leveraged in Rails environments (web servers, messaging etc) to potentially help improve solution scalability.

Now, we’re fans of the Pragmatic Programmers, we follow the trends, read plenty of other blogs and we’ve read (at least half) of The Tipping Point during various bathroom breaks, so we get that Erlang is growing in popularity as well as vaguely how that sort of growth would show itself in a venue like RailsConf.

As such, in anticipation of next years language du jour, we here at Bust Out Solutions feel there’s an intriguing opportunity looming on the horizon. Forget Haskell. And Scala. And Lua. And OCaml. It’s Java.

Got scalability issues with your JRuby on Rails application? You COULD use Erlang-based services, but that’s so last year. Throw it on a cluster of WebSphere App Servers running on some monster AIX boxes, fire up your Tibco ESB for some distributed JMS-ing, WS-ing, JBI-ing or straight up BPEL-ing, get a copy of Oracle Coherence for your distributed caching needs (you can even toss out the database with a big enough grid) and you’ll be all set. There are a lot of choices, which makes the whole experience all sort of infuriatingly fun and lucrative for others if you’re the generous type.

If anyone is interested, we’re open to speaking at next year’s conference. If we get rejected, even better, as I heard RejectConf was more stimulating than the real thing. Or maybe we can write a book….Java for Rails Developers?

As an aside, hats off to the community at RailsConf for donating over $30,000 to charity. It was a great idea and wonderful gesture from the community. Next year, we can surely do even better.

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