Shahzad Bhatti Welcome to my ramblings and rants!

In our daily scrum meeting at work last week, we identified one of application that had been crashing often. The application was pretty simple web application written in Java using Spring-MVC, Hibernate, Spring and Apache-commons libraries. However, the developer who released it embedded that application in another much bigger web application in order to save some deployment issues, which can be real pain at amazon. So, I volunteered to address the issue and rewrite the application in JRuby on Rails (2.1). It took me a day to rewrite all application and migrate all data from the old application. Along the way, I also added a couple of some additional features. The original application took a couple of weeks to develop and was consisted of over 6500 lines of code. The ruby version consisted a little less than 800 lines of code. I have been using Ruby on my own since 2004 and started learning Rails in 2005. Though, I started using Rails a bit more on some side projects after I attended Rails conference of 2006. I still use Java for most of the work, and was delighted to show speed of development with Rails at work. Since, the deployment issues are still pain in Rails so I chose JRuby that allows Rails apps to deploy on Tomcat, which we are using for most of the projects. Hopefuly, that will fix the stability issues and save me from pagers as I will be oncall next week.