Curt said:
If you were an early visitor to:
http://whyruby.rubyforge.org/wiki/wiki.pl?Ruby's_Best
You may want to go back again and look at all of the entries that other
people have made since then and vote for the ones you think are the best
representatives of outstanding Ruby software. The primary purpose is to get
a good sense of which Ruby packages are the best candidates to showcase in
presentations to advocate the use of Ruby.
Advocate the use of Ruby for *what*?
It isn't clear to me that what appears to be a popularity contest will
lead to a useful presentation on advocating Ruby. We might do better to
determine why people bother writing software at all, understand what
they look to accomplish, and show how Ruby suits their needs.
When trying to get people to use Ruby, the biggest push back I get is
"Nobody knows it. I can't get people to support it."
While showcasing WEBrick or Drb might get some nods of admiration, I
don't see how they demonstrate that Ruby a) is easy to learn, and b)
handles the same business requirements as Java, C#, and other, more
widely deployed, languages.
Maybe I miss the point of trying to pick some showcase Ruby programs,
unless the idea is to walk through the code and explain how
straightforward it is to write something interesting and good.
Or maybe to show off some stunt code in order to simply grab people's
attention. But "Watch, this is cool" only gets you so far.
The apps on that list are all quite good, but most would have had no
place in the last three Java jobs I had.
Ruby is competing against J2EE/JSP/servlets, and app servers such as
WebLogic, and their .Net counterparts.
We need to demonstrate that Ruby easier to develop, easier to maintain,
and solves the same business needs (including concerns over speed,
security, scalability, and reliability).
Perhaps Ruby needs the equivalent of the "Pet Store" example.
James