Commercial Support for Ruby

ruby-talk
1

Hi Everyone,

I am trying to "sell" my manager on the idea of using

Ruby to develop
some of our new products. One of the things he told me was that, in
looking toward the future, in order to be ISO 900x qualified,
we must be
using languages for which there exists commercial support.
He asked if
there was any commercial support for Ruby. Thus, my question:

 Does anyone know of any firms (not individual consultants) which

offer commercial support for, or a commercialized version of Ruby?

If you could send your replies to me, personally, I’d appreciate it,
as I’m no longer subscribed to the mailing list due to pressures of
work, lack of time, etc. Thanks alot.

Dennis Newbold
dennisn@pe.net

Right now? None that I’m aware of. This is why I’d like to see ActiveState
Ruby - it promotes the language by getting PHB’s to use it.

/me thinks of writing up a proposal to ActiveState. What’s Vancouver like,
anyway. :slight_smile:

Regards,

Dan

2

“Berger, Daniel” djberge@qwest.com wrote in message news:7DC1217518FCD311A08A0050DA78574003C6B536@iamspems04.interprise.com…

Right now? None that I’m aware of. This is why I’d like to see ActiveState
Ruby - it promotes the language by getting PHB’s to use it.

/me thinks of writing up a proposal to ActiveState. What’s Vancouver like,
anyway. :slight_smile:

Vancouver’s great - could stand to be a tad more cosmopolitan if
you’re used to, say, New York or Chicago, but it’s hard to beat the
combination of city, sea, and mountains. And the ActiveState offices
are lovely.

Last time I talked to them, they seemed skeptical about the commercial
viability of supporting Ruby, but things have picked up speed since
then and perhaps they’re reevaluating by now…

3

Avi Bryant wrote:

“Berger, Daniel” djberge@qwest.com wrote in message news:7DC1217518FCD311A08A0050DA78574003C6B536@iamspems04.interprise.com…

Right now? None that I’m aware of. This is why I’d like to see ActiveState
Ruby - it promotes the language by getting PHB’s to use it.

/me thinks of writing up a proposal to ActiveState. What’s Vancouver like,
anyway. :slight_smile:

Vancouver’s great - could stand to be a tad more cosmopolitan if
you’re used to, say, New York or Chicago, but it’s hard to beat the
combination of city, sea, and mountains. And the ActiveState offices
are lovely.

Last time I talked to them, they seemed skeptical about the commercial
viability of supporting Ruby, but things have picked up speed since
then and perhaps they’re reevaluating by now…

That would be a Good Thing. I love to have consistent packages, and
since I already have ActivePerl, ActivePython and ActiveTcl,
ActiveRuby is what I’m missing (esp. considering that I’m not able to
get the -mswin32 and -mingw32 builds to work …)

Next, considering that we have wxPython, an alpha wxPerl, what we
still miss is a wxTcl and a wxRuby. Goodie.

/me drools

···

–
Giuseppe “Oblomov” Bilotta

Axiom I of the Giuseppe Bilotta
theory of IT:
Anything is better than MS

4

In article 6e869a6b.0207122344.c6b42a7@posting.google.com,

“Berger, Daniel” djberge@qwest.com wrote in message
news:7DC1217518FCD311A08A0050DA78574003C6B536@iamspems04.interprise.com…

Right now? None that I’m aware of. This is why I’d like to see ActiveState
Ruby - it promotes the language by getting PHB’s to use it.

/me thinks of writing up a proposal to ActiveState. What’s Vancouver like,
anyway. :slight_smile:

Vancouver’s great - could stand to be a tad more cosmopolitan if
you’re used to, say, New York or Chicago, but it’s hard to beat the
combination of city, sea, and mountains. And the ActiveState offices
are lovely.

Yeah, Vancouver is great and plenty cosomopolitan for my taste…
It’s kind of spendy though…

Last time I talked to them, they seemed skeptical about the commercial
viability of supporting Ruby, but things have picked up speed since
then and perhaps they’re reevaluating by now…

I suspect that they’re not currently hiring, though (same reason most
other places aren’t hiring right now [at least not hiring permanent
employees, that is]). Their website lists a couple of openings, both
are in sales and marketing, not development openings. When I contacted
them over a year ago about openings for Ruby developers the person I heard
back from said that they were interested in working on Ruby but that they
had to wait for a more favorable business climate before they could
take on a new language. Well, the business climate is, if anything, worse
than it was a year ago.

No, I don’t think we can depend on ActiveState to give us a ‘commercially
supported’ Ruby (that works well on Windoze too). I’ll echo the
sentiments of others here: I’m not sure that we really need a
‘commercially supported’ Ruby, and ISO900X is pretty much useless or
worse. Community support, in my experience, is actually much better than
coporate support (but, of course it’s hard to convice the PHBs of this).

That said, I wonder if we as a community can do for Ruby what ActiveState
has done for Perl and Python - that is, provide a nicely packaged version
for Windows. I think Andrew Hunt has done a wonderful job with the Ruby
Windows package he has put together, but as several threads have recently
pointed out, there is still a lot more to be done.

At any rate, I think the main point I want to get across here is that we
shouldn’t be waiting for ActiveState to come along and do all of this for
us - I don’t think it’s gonna happen. I believe that ActiveState receives
a good bit of their support from Microsoft - without that support I wonder
if they could even survive with their current business model. I really
don’t understand why anyone would use ActiveState (Perl|Python|Tcl|Ruby?)
on, say, Linux, but it does offer a lot of “added value” under Windows.

So, What would it take to bring our current Ruby for Windows package up to
the level of what ActiveState is providing for Perl or Python on Windows?

Phil

···

Avi Bryant avi@beta4.com wrote:

5

Phil Tomson wrote:

So, What would it take to bring our current Ruby for Windows package up to
the level of what ActiveState is providing for Perl or Python on Windows?

Easy installation which works “out of the box”, system integration
(with nice icons! ;>), nice HTML documentation.

···

–
Giuseppe “Oblomov” Bilotta

Axiom I of the Giuseppe Bilotta
theory of IT:
Anything is better than MS

6

Giuseppe Bilotta wrote:

Easy installation which works “out of the box”,

Did you have any problems with Andy’s installer?

system integration

very important

(with nice icons! ;>)

not so important

nice HTML documentation.

Pickaxe.

I don’t think these are the most important issues.

Many areas have been identified where improvement is required, check the
archives (net/http hangs etc).

Tobi

···

–
http://www.pinkjuice.com/

7

Giuseppe Bilotta oblomov@freemail.it writes:

So, What would it take to bring our current Ruby for Windows package up to
the level of what ActiveState is providing for Perl or Python on Windows?

Easy installation which works “out of the box”, system integration
(with nice icons! ;>), nice HTML documentation.

Could you elaborate some more, so we can work on these features. In
the current installer, what would need to be done to make it work out
of the box? We also distribute Programming Ruby in the installation as
a .chm file: would straight html be better?

Cheers

Dave

8

Dave Thomas wrote:

Giuseppe Bilotta oblomov@freemail.it writes:

So, What would it take to bring our current Ruby for Windows package up to
the level of what ActiveState is providing for Perl or Python on Windows?

Easy installation which works “out of the box”, system integration
(with nice icons! ;>), nice HTML documentation.

Could you elaborate some more, so we can work on these features. In
the current installer, what would need to be done to make it work out
of the box?

Hey hey hey wait a second. Installer? Which installer? Oops! I didn’t
know about any such thing! Where can I get it?

We also distribute Programming Ruby in the installation as
a .chm file: would straight html be better?

IMO yes. HTML works everywhere, even on older systems (Win95 anyone?)
which have no support for .chm help files. Also, one can use its
favourite browser, not necessarily IE (do you know how many people
are trying to ditch IE and can’t because of this?)

···

–
Giuseppe “Oblomov” Bilotta

Axiom I of the Giuseppe Bilotta
theory of IT:
Anything is better than MS

9

Tobias Reif wrote:

Giuseppe Bilotta wrote:

Easy installation which works “out of the box”,

Did you have any problems with Andy’s installer?

No, I didn’t know it existed :frowning:

system integration

very important

(with nice icons! ;>)

not so important

Definitely :slight_smile: Notice the smileys :slight_smile:

nice HTML documentation.

Pickaxe.

Uh?

I don’t think these are the most important issues.

Many areas have been identified where improvement is required, check the
archives (net/http hangs etc).

I’ll tell you after I manage to get a working installation … URL to
Andy’s installer?

···

–
Giuseppe “Oblomov” Bilotta

Axiom I of the Giuseppe Bilotta
theory of IT:
Anything is better than MS

10

Giuseppe Bilotta wrote:

I’ll tell you after I manage to get a working installation … URL to
Andy’s installer?

Ok I got it. Call me stupid or blind :frowning:

I’m downloading it now. (What’s the story with TclTk? Does it have a
full TclTk thing? Will it live with ActiveTcl?)

will let you know as soon as I finish.

···

–
Giuseppe “Oblomov” Bilotta

Axiom I of the Giuseppe Bilotta
theory of IT:
Anything is better than MS

11

Snip!

nice HTML documentation.

Pickaxe.

Uh?

The pickaxe is the affectionate term for the Programming Ruby book, due to
the picture on the cover.
John.

12

Giuseppe Bilotta wrote:

Easy installation which works “out of the box”, system integration
(with nice icons! ;>), nice HTML documentation.

Could you elaborate some more, so we can work on these features. In
the current installer, what would need to be done to make it work out
of the box?

Hey hey hey wait a second. Installer? Which installer? Oops! I didn’t
know about any such thing! Where can I get it?

We also distribute Programming Ruby in the installation as
a .chm file: would straight html be better?

IMO yes. HTML works everywhere, even on older systems (Win95 anyone?)
which have no support for .chm help files. Also, one can use its
favourite browser, not necessarily IE (do you know how many people
are trying to ditch IE and can’t because of this?)

Ok, I got the installer and now I have Ruby (1.6.6) finally on my
system :). Goodie. Now for the comments:

Would it be possible to install the non-strictly-Ruby stuff in other
directories? I have a \langs\ folder on the root on my boot drive,
under which there is a subfolder for each scripting language (one for
perl, one for python, one for ruby, one for tcl, etc). Assuming that
I didn’t have tcl installed, I might have wnated to install tcl from
the ruby package, but then I would have liked to put it in its own
folder, not under ruby.

Re. the problem with MS compilers and multithreading, would mingw32
solve the problem?

And of course we want the most recent Ruby :wink:

For the help packaging, I still suggest plain HTML rather than .chm
files --this could be shared with a possible non-Windows version of
Ruby (if a parallel installer for unices is in the works).

Finally, I wonder if some form of semi-automatic package installation
is feasible. (Active)Perl has ppm and CPAN; Python has the Vault;
does Ruby have a CRAN? Can it be made accessible with some tool that
downloads and install packages (on request)?

···

–
Giuseppe “Oblomov” Bilotta

Axiom I of the Giuseppe Bilotta
theory of IT:
Anything is better than MS

13

John wrote:

Snip!

nice HTML documentation.

Pickaxe.

Uh?

The pickaxe is the affectionate term for the Programming Ruby book, due to
the picture on the cover.

Oh, thanks :slight_smile:

···

–
Giuseppe “Oblomov” Bilotta

Axiom I of the Giuseppe Bilotta
theory of IT:
Anything is better than MS

14

No, but it has rpkg.

Buona visione. :slight_smile:

Massimiliano

···

On Mon, Jul 15, 2002 at 08:22:52PM +0900, Giuseppe Bilotta wrote:

Finally, I wonder if some form of semi-automatic package installation
is feasible. (Active)Perl has ppm and CPAN; Python has the Vault;
does Ruby have a CRAN?

15

But .chm is searchable !

···

On Mon, 15 Jul 2002 11:15:19 GMT, Giuseppe Bilotta oblomov@freemail.it wrote:

For the help packaging, I still suggest plain HTML rather than .chm
files --this could be shared with a possible non-Windows version of
Ruby (if a parallel installer for unices is in the works).

16

list@chromatic-harp.com wrote:

···

On Mon, Jul 15, 2002 at 08:22:52PM +0900, Giuseppe Bilotta wrote:

Finally, I wonder if some form of semi-automatic package installation
is feasible. (Active)Perl has ppm and CPAN; Python has the Vault;
does Ruby have a CRAN?

No, but it has rpkg.

http://www.allruby.com/rpkg/index.html

Buona visione. :slight_smile:

Grazie :smiley:

–
Giuseppe “Oblomov” Bilotta

Axiom I of the Giuseppe Bilotta
theory of IT:
Anything is better than MS

17

Lothar Scholz wrote:

···

On Mon, 15 Jul 2002 11:15:19 GMT, Giuseppe Bilotta > oblomov@freemail.it wrote:

For the help packaging, I still suggest plain HTML rather than .chm
files --this could be shared with a possible non-Windows version of
Ruby (if a parallel installer for unices is in the works).

But .chm is searchable !

You got a point there (ok, I use standard search tools to search HTML
anyway, so …). Maybe old-style .hlp files? These would work on
older Win95 too … Or maybe multiple formats? How would this
increase the package size?

–
Giuseppe “Oblomov” Bilotta

Axiom I of the Giuseppe Bilotta
theory of IT:
Anything is better than MS

18

Giuseppe Bilotta oblomov@freemail.it writes:

You got a point there (ok, I use standard search tools to search HTML
anyway, so …). Maybe old-style .hlp files? These would work on
older Win95 too … Or maybe multiple formats? How would this
increase the package size?

Can you generate .hlp from xml/html?