On 07/12/2011, at 6:01 PM, Dmytrii Nagirniak wrote:

> Every time I hear something like this (different environments) I remember a 
> DBA I used to work with. He said that you should always run the same 
> environment everywhere.

Indeed.  On the other hand, I think the benefits we got from using a 
lighter-weight stack for development outweighed the disadvantages.

>> 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.
> 
> So again gems compatibility...
> Hmm. Do you know how much it has changed since?

I think it depends entirely on the gems you're using.  Anything pure-Ruby is 
unlikely to cause issues - it's the stuff that requires native bindings that 
killed us.  In some cases, the gem we wanted simply wasn't available for JRuby. 
 This may have improved since, with the work the JRuby guys did last year to 
support MRI's C-extension API. 

In the case of Nokogiri, using it with JRuby required use of FFI, which caused 
installation problems; sorry, I can't recall the details.  The Nokogiri crowd 
have now dumped the FFI bindings, and implemented a "pure Java" backend.  I 
played with the early releases of that work, and hit too many problems.  I'm 
sure things have improved, but given that it sits on a completely different 
foundation (Xerces, Xalan, etc, rather than libxml) I very much doubt that it's 
100% compatible across platforms.

>> In retrospect, I wish I'd pushed harder, and earlier, to use a different 
>> (and non-proprietary) database, and stuck with MRI.

> Good point. Would you consider neo4j proprietary though?

Not at all.  If you can easily run it (for free) in your development 
environment, then that's good enough for me.

-- 
cheers, 
Mike Williams

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