On 07/12/2011, at 12:54 PM, Dmytrii Nagirniak wrote:

> I wonder what arguments do you have against JRuby and what experience have 
> you had with it?

Back when Lonely Planet was starting to use Ruby/Rails, we (well, I) choose to 
use JRuby, rather than MRI, in production.  Much like your situation, the 
reason was ease of data-access - we were required to use MS SQL Server, and 
given the state of the relevant drivers, it was much easier to do so using JDBC.

We seldom used JRuby in development environments, though, mainly because of the 
VM startup time.  This led to a situation where development and most of the 
automated testing ran on a slightly different stacks.  Most of the time that 
worked out okay, but when there were compatibility problems, they were a real 
pig to track down and fix.  To be fair, many of these problems were caused by 
differing RDBMS engines (MS-SQL vs SQLite), rather than anything specific to 
JRuby.

The situation reached breaking point when we started doing a lot of work with 
XML and HTML, and became heavily dependent on Nokogiri, which produced a 
constant stream of issues on JRuby.  In the end, LP yanked out MS-SQL in favour 
of PostgreSQL, and reverted to MRI.

JRuby is a fantastic project, and I have a lot of respect for @headius, 
@nickseiger, and the other guys.  In retrospect, I wish I'd pushed harder, and 
earlier, to use a different (and non-proprietary) database, and stuck with MRI.

As Michael P said, once you wander off the conventional path (Rails on MRI, 
with MySQL or PostgreSQL behind) you're more likely to hit issues that other 
people haven't ... or at least issues that other people haven't already solved. 
 Having said that, you're halfway there already, by choosing to use Neo4J, so 
why not go all out? :-)

-- 
cheers, 
Mike Williams

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