Laurent’s Weblog

How a rich week with Oracle …after Oracle VM, the Oracle & Adobe collaboration exposed at Open World, let’s continue with the recently released social networking website : Oracle Mix

I just want to speak about the “how” of Oracle Mix and some common experience i have with RoR and their Oracle environment.

I learned some months ago via Oracle AppsLab that Oracle was looking for people with RoR experience..and especially one goal was to run RoR application into the Oc4J (Oracle J2EE container).

So what we learned today (source InfoQ) , about Oracle Mix :

- First Oracle Mix has been developed in less than 5 weeks with RoR specialists of ThoughtWorks , a company specialized in Ruby and dynamic languages, Java and .NET. ThoughtWorks is well known for having released CruiseControl , the leading continuous integration and deployment tool, declined for Ruby and .NET, and more recently , Mingle , a tool for Agile Software Development.

- Oracle Mix has been developed in JRuby on Rails and works over an Oracle Database, interfaced with Oracle Internet Directory (LDAP server) and the Oracle Single Sign On, and deployed into Oracle Application Server.

At the end of the InfoQ article, a call ha been made to get feed back from people already having a project made with JRuby on Rails in production…and…yes, some people from my company, Hortis, begun some months ago a project called Sonar , an entreprise quality control tool and have built the web interface for the dashboard with JRuby on Rails. Simon Brandhof just gave his feedback here.

On my side, i’m currently working professionnally on a project developed with Ruby on Rails in Oracle environment :

- The portal (for internal use) is developed with RoR, fully ajaxified, including web 2 features and :

- built on top of an Oracle database 10g

- the RoR portal is interfaced with Oracle Internet Directory (LDAP), Oracle Single SignOn, Oracle Collaboration Suite (CMS, Mail, IM)

- Integration of external applications developed with Oracle Application Express, Forms and BI Publisher.

- deployed on a Suse Linux box, into the LiteSpeed WebServer.

i would thank you my colleague Ludovic for all the work he has been doing for two years to make this architecture possible and Up & Running today (i joined the project 7 months ago)

As we began recently a consolidation of servers, thanks to all this work on Oracle Mix, i have now new hopes to be able, in a near future, to deploy our RoR application into an OC4J instance of Oracle Application Server 10g…

It really is a great job from the Oracle Team and ThoughtWorks.

We should not forget the JRuby team , and Charles Oliver Nutter , for the great efforts they do everyday for many months to make evolve Java et Ruby together.