wiennat

Last week I went to Thailand Next Web App and joined in a Rails session. They had a talk and discussed about running Rails in production. Of course, JRuby, Glassfish and other Ruby implementation including IronRuby were mentioned. Then I was asked about it because I was the only .NET guy there. At that time, I didn’t follow the IronRuby for a long time so I replied them that no one other than John Lam and Phil Haacked have used the IronRuby.

Few days ago, while I read the feed about asp.net, I found an open source IronRuby project that aims to help developer implement WPF/Silverlight in rails-like fashion. And that’s mean we, the developers, now can use IronRuby.

After some googling, I’ve recalled that IronRuby, like IronPython, is part of the Microsoft Dynamic Language Runtime. They both are released with full source under Microsoft Public License(MS-PL). Though the source code of IronRuby is hosted on RubyForge and IronPython is on the CodePlex, the license doesn’t mention that they’re open source projects. However, the IronRuby libraries are tended to be open source and are opened to receive the contributions.

From the IronRuby home page, the implementation still does not pass the RubySpecs and can only dispatch some Rails requests. That’s mean it still cannot be used to host a Rails application. But you can utilize .NET framework and create an application with it, like IronNails. If you want to give it a try, you have to compile it yourself from the source. Of course, Windows machine is essential.

In TNWA last week, Sirn said “Don’t host your rails apps with IIS”. I’m sure the situation will change if IronRuby can host Rails app perfectly and I’m waiting for that day.

PS. As for IronPython, I saw how IronPython used with ASP.NET and it was fantastic!! However, I never have chance to try it myself.