Pragmatic - From Java To Ruby

Introduction

As I drove across the central Texas landscape, my excitement and anxiety were both building. I was driving to a new client that would change everything for me. This short trip would take me an hour south to a small college town, but symbolically I was beginning a much longer journey. I was going from Java to Ruby.

The past year, I had been involved in my first non-Java project in more than a decade, and based on that success, I had recently written a book called Beyond Java. I called into question my investments in not only the Java platform but also ten years of skills, hundreds of customers, scores of enterprise applications, four Java books (including three Java One best-sellers and a Jolt award), and a reputation as a pragmatic Java developer. As often happens, researching Beyond Java changed the way I think about software development today. Modern programming should be about leverage, with much more emphasis on total cost and productivity. The more I learned, the more I believed that this industry was heading for a revolution that would change the way we write most database-backed Internet applications first and a much broader suite of applications later. I put together a plan to ready my company for the pending revolution, but planning and executing show much different levels of commitment. This client would be my first full- Ruby client.