Like a couple of aging heavyweight fighters, Java and Microsoft have been slugging it out in the enterprise web application market for some time now. It seems like the fight continues round after round with no real winner in sight. But there have been some very interesting things happening in the last month that seem to indicate that the conditions may be right for Ruby on Rails (RoR) to slide in take some of the “Enterprise” market share.When I refer to “Enterprise” I am most certainly pointing at the plethora of programming shops where they’re sticking to ASP.Net or JSP and Servlets. I have worked in the former for the last 8 years and have worked with external vendors and service providers that were the latter. Many of the platform discussions came down to the same points. Funny thing is, they seem similarly bloated at times for solving some of the same everyday problems. If you want to see a good comparison of Ruby to C# (Java guys will feel at home too), check out Softies on Rails.

For the Java environments, JRuby has hit another milestone and they are confident enough to hang it out there for RoR developers to give it a shot. Building a Ruby interpreter on Java instead of C allows you to extend the Java classes, deploy Rails applications to a web server as a WAR file, and provide similar portability to RoR as Cold Fusion enjoys.

For the Microsoft environments, the IIS Team announced they have implemented Fast CGI for IIS 7. This will make RoR on IIS more efficient and easier to deploy. Rob Conery has the drop on this as well as instructions for how he was able to make this work. Rob is the founder of a framework for .Net inspired by Rails called SubSonic and if you write ASP.Net 2.0 applications, you need to take a look.

Both of these recent events seem to indicate that in organizations that already have a significant amount of infrastructure built up in either Java or .Net will not have to do much at all to make Rails run in the same environment. I think this will lead to greater adoption because it will be faster and easier to deploy and configure, making it an easier sell to your development manager, VP, etc., or for you to sneak it in.