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Sounds lazy and stupid to me. Write once run anywhere toolkits always give a sub-par user experience. This is why Java UIs never really took off, and why Adobe AIR apps always get bitched about. Plus, you're always lagging behind the platform in supported features. This is one of those cases where mediocre is frequently worse than nothing.

Jane Q. Public: Either you didn't read the comments of that blog or you're spreading FUD. Here is a comment from Alex Payne from that article:

Hoo boy. First of all, I hope you've had a chance to read my general reply to the articles about my Web 2.0 Expo talk [1] and this response to a vocal member of the Ruby community [2]. I sound like a pretty unreasonable guy filtered through the tech press and Reddit comments, but I hope less so in my own words.

Secondly, the quote at the top of your post is from my coworker, Steve Jenson, who's been participating in the discussion on this post.

On JRuby: as Steve said, we can't actually boot our main Rails app on JRuby. That's a blocker. Incidentally, if you know of anyone who has a large JRuby deployment, we'd be interested in that first-hand experience. If you don't, it might be a little early to say it would solve all our problems.

It's also incorrect to say that the way JRuby and Scala make use of the JVM is exactly the same. Much like our other decisions haven't been arbitrary, our decision to use Scala over other JVM-hosted languages was based on investigation.

On our culture: if you'd like to know about how we write code, or how our code has evolved over time, just ask us. We're all on Twitter, of course, but most of the engineers also have blogs and publish their email addresses. There's no need to speculate. Just ask. There's not a "raging debate" internally because we make our engineering decisions like engineers: we experiment, and base our decisions on the results of those experiments.

It's definitely true that Starling and Evented Starling are relatively immature queuing systems. I was eager to get them out of our stack. So, as Steve said, we put all the MQ's you think we'd try through their paces not too long ago, and we knocked one after another over in straightforward benchmarks. Some, like RabbitMQ, just up and died. Others chugged on, but slowly. Where we ran into issues, we contacted experts and applied best practices, but in the end, we found that Kestrel fit our particular use cases better and more reliably. This was not the hypothesis we had going into those benchmarks, but it's what the data bore out.

We get a lot of speculation to the tune of "why haven't those idiots tried x, it's so obvious!" Generally, we have tried x, as well as y and z. Funnily enough, I was actually pushing to get us on RabbitMQ, but our benchmarks showed that it just wouldn't work for us, which is a shame, because it advertises some sexy features.

Personally, I'm extremely NIH-averse; I research open source and commercial solutions before cutting a new path. In the case of our MQ, one of our engineers actually wrote Kestrel in his free time, so it was bit more like we adopted an existing open source project than rolled our own. Pretty much the last thing we want to be doing is focusing on problems outside our domain. As it so happens, though, moving messages around quickly is our business. I don't think it's crazy-go-nuts that we've spent some time on an MQ.

I hope my colleagues and I have been able to answer some of your questions. As I said, in the future, please consider emailing us so we can share our experience. Then, we can have a public discussion about facts, not speculation. Perhaps, as commenter sethladd suggested, the onus is on us to produce a whitepaper or presentation about our findings so as to stave off such speculation. Time constraints are the main reason why we haven't done so.

[1] http://al3x.net/2009/04/04/reasoned-technical-discussion.html
[2] http://blog.obiefernandez.com/content/2009/04/my-reasoned-response-about-scala-at-twitter.html#IDComment18212539

Note: the author has since posted a retraction of sorts, saying that coherency was edited out of the article in revisions, and he didn't check it thoroughly enough before approving the edits to go through.

"Lessons In Being Edited

Today, I learned something useful the hard way. Which is, incidentally, pretty much the way I learn everything.

A couple months back I was invited to post on a web site that specializes in commentary about the future of the Internet. I did an interview with one of the site's editors. In subsequent weeks, I found it hard to make the time to write a proper editorial-style piece for them. I finally made the time this past weekend, and earlier today my piece was published in an edited form.

I was given the opportunity to see the edits. But I still had my original words so clearly in my head that I glossed over the edited version, checking only for glaring mistakes in grammar. I should have taken more care â" and this is entirely my fault â" because portions of my original piece that were essential to a cogent argument were removed. I don't think the editor had any ill intent, and it was my failed responsibility to ensure that I was happy with what got published.

Presently, the piece is being torn into by commenters, and perhaps rightly so: without some of the material I originally included, it comes off as flimsy troll-bait. I could post the edited-out paragraphs in a comment on the piece, but out of context they don't offer much.

The experience has been a valuable lesson for me. The next time someone wants to edit my writing, I need to take time and approach the edited version as a new reader would. Had I done so, I wouldn't have allowed the piece to be published in its final form. It's not really possible to retract something published on the web, nor is retraction in keeping with the informal ethics of blogging. But like Fred Wilson a few days ago, I just want to take it back.

What I was hoping for was honest answers to an honest question: how much do we have to lose before we consider different strategies for Internet technologies? Because I failed to take care with how my words were published, I'm not going to learn anything. That's the real loss for me."

I posted on this very same matter back in November, though with an eye more towards sorting out such taxonomical discrepancies with code. I guess I should have hacked something up then. Still, nice to see folks thinking about the same issues.

Yes, fuck me