As someone who has spent more time doing java enterprise stuff that RoR, this sounds pretty decent to me on the surface. Two things that come to mind are:
1) Most remote interfaces that the big companies have written in the past 8 years have been web services, so he might not even need to create anything that compiles down to java byte code. Older stuff that uses RMI or has (heaven forbid EJB interfaces to the outside world) would need java byte code. 2) He'll lose a lot of the productivity that rails gains if he's going to access a jms or REST api rather than a database. Where I've been particularly impressed with Rails is in its complete back to front management of a web app. Having said this, I'm not sure if it would be entirely safe to share a transactional database between a rails app and 1 or more java apps. Probably would be better to replicate the java app database for the rails app to use. Hopefully I'm not missing something, but wouldn't most people agree that if all you get of rails is the view stuff, that you can't sell your boss the massive productivity gains? I'm sure there are many other points to consider, but these are the first two things that came to mind. --Jon On Mon, Aug 31, 2009 at 8:08 AM, Scott Olmsted <[email protected]> wrote: > > A software architect friend wrote me with a question I can't answer because > I don't do Java. I though I would see if any one has any comments on his > idea, or links to resources. > > Thanks, > > Scott > > He wrote: > > I'm thinking for the start-up that I will be working with of using an > architecture with Rails as the web site, but the back end consisting of a > cluster of various long-running services and integrations with other > financial institutions, to use java. It seems that all of the enterprise > middleware is java-based, so if you want to do something in that area, you > kinda have to use java or at least something that compiles down to java byte > code. > > The motivation would be to try to take advantage of the productivity gains > of RAILS at least for those portions of the site. > > The Ruby front end would function as a client of the business servers using > REST or some other API; or it could use the java JMS API to access the > queuing middleware, if we use jRuby. > > Do you have any thoughts on this architecture? Warnings? > > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ SD Ruby mailing list [email protected] http://groups.google.com/group/sdruby -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
