In the past few months I have spent a lot of time discussing the state of language adoption these days.   Much of my time in the past was spent in the financial services in a world of C++, Java and .Net (probably in those proportions - mixed in with a lot of database-centric stuff and legacy languages i.e. COBOL).   Back in 2003 I was heavily involved in bringing more open source into the mix - it was heavily in the Java world.  Working with large investment banks it was an interesting journey pushing through the barriers to get products like JBoss into production and to allow the big savings.   Back in 2005 I was hacking stuff with early additions of Groovy,  the idea was to use scripting languages to allow business people to build a DSL that would allow them to define rules without getting stuck into XML (there was a lot of that going around).  While that work didn’t get into production it did get me thinking more about DSL’s and of course led me to Ruby.  While I started working with Rails back then I was ultimately pulled away into the SOA world again with ServiceMix - and then into the Maven space with DevZuz - and also more into Eclipse et al.

Now at Exist I have been given the chance to look across more technologies again and so it is back to Ruby.   A lot has changed with a huge number of advances in Behaviour Driven Development with Rails 2.0 coming out.  I have to admit there is a lot to pick up again,  and I’m taking time to catch up with it all again.  Though as I start to enter the Ruby world it is nice to see a lot of really nice tools out there to make the work of creating rich solutions easier and easier.  Lately for me it has been working with newgem and rspec,  to start to allow some definition around a component layer for a pet project.

Also I got a chance to hang out with the growing Ruby on Rails scene in Manila which was fun - if you are out here for a while its worth catching up with them.   I’m sure in the next few months I’ll be seeing more and more of Ruby and Rails, and probably a bit of Merb and ActiveResource too.