May G-d save us all. Everyone over 23 years old, at least.
One man’s impression on the new model of an emerging class of entrepreneurs.
Overview
I attended the Boston Web Innovators conference in a noisy, Cambridge bar. I arrived early, because I knew that the presenters would be setting up projectors and such. I spoke to several of the young men and women (there were many), and got to know a little about their thoughts on the technical aspects of development, tools, trends, and business models.
I also met the event host, David Beisel. He is an Associate at Masthead Venture Partners. David is a good man, trying his best to cultivate very early stage Web 2.0 ventures – these such as we saw at the Innovators Conference are far too small and at far too early a stage for his VenCap firm to fund. However, he is visionary looking down the long road of his portfolio, and the willingness he professes via these events (out of his pocket, although I paid for an $11.00 Bailey’s) is testament to his faith in Web 2.0.
There are several aspects to my analysis
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The tenor of the event and personalities
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The hype over Ruby on Rails development environment (I may need deprogramming)
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The attitude, enough and to spare, of these very young, very smart developers, of existing tools, infrastructure, application hosting, and what makes their clock tick
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Why are these inventors, and a new class of their investors, so displeased over the words ‘enterprise anything’, and so negative on any tool or product that needs to be paid for or licensed? The venom was palpable,
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Is there an opening for Open Link? In short, like anything, and with and OpenMind, and an agile spirit – yes, there is an approach strategy.
The Event
As I said, I arrived early as I knew the presenters would be setting up. I spoke to the founder of Blognicient – he didn’t have a card, but did have an MIT class ring(Put a pin in that thought). I spoke with the Kiko founders, and many others.
They were young, each one younger than the next – a range of 19-27 years tops. The room was filling fast, it resembled a frat party with geeks. There were many female technoratti. My former experience of these Vencap events are more formal and everyone wants a deal – but David was not besieged. In spite of the noise, he was having relaxed conversations with the attendees.
The overall feel of the event was an after work party, and these young folks were into what they were doing – if they were hot for equity, they didn’t show their cards at all. May thought that they could get their lightweight web applications up, get advertising, and self finance without dilution. More on this soon; it all ties to Rails and the founder of ROR’s success in making a success from Rails and the subsequent applications that made it big – Base Camp –Tada-Backpack.
The Ruby on Rails Hype, Religion, Saturation
Every last one of the presenters had an MIT class ring. Every Presentation had something to say about Ruby on Rails. One of the more pointed and cogent questions of the event was to Blogniscient’s
founder, Ben Ruedlinger: “….is the ranking engine also done in Rails?”, answer, “no, we have a custom process that is proprietary.” “psssss….said the Crowd.
So, why is Rails so important to these folks? I cannot answer this. There is some evidence that the creator of Rails (Ruby is not a part of Rails per se, but happens to be the ‘chosen’ language for it’s early development), made good in delivering the type of lightweight applications that made a commercial splash, and quickly. These attendees have tremendous respect for David Heinemeier Hansson of 37Signals.com. He has put back into the community by continually improving, evangelizing, and nurturing the Rails ethos.
So we start with respect for a visionary. One of the attendees grabbed me by the collar and sat me down at a Power book and then there was no stopping him and his girl friend from showing what Rails can do for my life. I was transfixed – but I’m easy to impress.
Am I the best person to give a technical lowdown on Rails? No. But I had to take a day, digest and re-read what I had seen at the event, which was impressive. Several of the attendees were stone cold C++ and C#/Java experts, and they were converted. One chap led me through an exercise that created a file sharing system and download service, with account management - in 20 minutes, with explanations. That’s an agile environment.
As to what it actually is, well, let better minds decide. As to the impact, participation, and feel of a wider community – I can tell you without a shadow of doubt, that there is movement afoot here. www.slash7.com/articles/2005/01/24/really-getting-started-in-rails
“Rails means the end of XML files telling a story that has already been told in code. It means no compilation phase: Make a change, see it work. Meta-data is an implementation detail left for the framework to handle.” According to the gaggle, Rails came from the Design Patterns school of programming thought.
Rails is an MVC (Mode-View-Controller) framework that forces separation of presentation layer code from logic and metadata. That’s all I’m going to say about the technical side of Rails for now, but I intend to learn more about it and try and get a working knowledge of it in time.
Currently the important thing to bring home (or take away) is that the LAMPS community, the MySQL folks, are sold on ROR’s ability to completely abstract the SQL generation and need for repetitive code driven queries that they have been dealing with for years – and have become quite good at.
Ruby on Rails is becoming an industry with wide ranging participation from the LAMPs community. There is tremendous buy in from the book publishers, and a love for Rails that has even given birth to a full length illustrated comic book / tutorial (http://poignantguide.net/ruby/).
The Attitude
These were no punks and hackers – these were MIT CS grads and students late in the MSEE and MSCS Programs. There were also advanced amateurs, some were from Sloan School of Management, who were self-taught Rail Heads. They were also friendly, and went out of their way to ask me about my business and who I represented.
Now I’m just reporting as I heard it; it will do no good to correct or refute me on the following points. While being very polite they pointed out that any product that pitched an Enterprise Integration POV was too heavy and expensive for the type of lightweight apps they were developing. They also said that if there was a need to have mainline RDBMS connections, they would only have to wait or in some cases purchase data access infrastructure. They seemed genuinely hostile to paying for a server or middleware license. “we are free now”, said one fellow, “from Microsoft .net, from J2EE, from even some of the Open Source environments that were so arcane”.
Some were willing to read my nascent thoughts on Virtuoso as a type of contributed equity. It didn’t go over very well. But they were nice enough about it.
One quote is memorable, “Maybe if and when Rails becomes a more mainstream environment for the “daily work”, an expensive data integration platform and web services product might find it’s way to make rails the preferred encompassing environment for bringing it all together”. Until then, they are pinning bets on MySQL, and CGI – this is the exploitable weak link for some tool smith.
Why so negative?
My question: “Can you envision or foresee any type of tool or infrastructure that is worth paying for? Why so negative?”
The general answer that I am paraphrasing here is as follows:
‘We tried to love MS tools in our curriculum, and got screwed with bugs and locked-in to upgrades that often were not viable. We do see innovative licensed products, ad they do have advantages over the Open Source LAMPS world, mostly in ease of use and support, and scalability – but this has just become almost a moot point, now that Rails is here and is attracting much talent.”
“we are just glad to be free” “you can be free with us”. I have to get back to earth, thanks.
Q: If Rails could be fully integrated into Virtuoso, would it be an option for you as a data serving platform?
A: What will you do to us once we have built on that monster? (this from a young woman, a My SQL expert and Rails whiz) – show me one thing that server can do that I cant do now. I mentioned the data integration, etc. She’s patient – she will wait for the demo.
Is there an Opening?
I sat there as she demonstrated so many things that my head spun – to truly evaluate the breadth of the Ajax functions and dynamic database bindings through the scaffolding would take an expert, like Kingsley Idehen.
”Stop, you are hurting me”, I said to the young lady, “I’m an older man, you are going to break something in my mind – give me a stroke”. Please tell me, what is the Opening for commercial offerings?”
Another young man stepped up and went into a whole diatribe as to how CGI based Rails Production environments are of poor quality, and that the workarounds by Rails specialty hosting companies are string and bailing wire.
“They have never been tested at full deployment scale, to tens of thousands of threads. The limitation is not MySQL, it is the CGI interpreters. This is where Rails Hosts make their money – but none of them have ever – repeat ever – fielded a world scale app.”
This got me wondering about the famous Base Camp, the original Rails application. I wonder what they use, as 37signals certainly has tens of thousands of paying users.
Before that research is completed, you might want to consider that even Rail Fans are not so sanguine about their hosting options, and that none has gained the super notoriety of Base Camp – so there is a market of hosts that are holding it together and may be looking for real commercial grade Software that can Host Ruby on Rails.
As a sophisticated layman, in many ways, I can only surmise that the Rails Community is gaining ground fast, but lacks an industrial strength data hub and services infrastructure – while Virtuoso has no community, so to speak, and has power coming out of its ears.
Here are the Cleavage Points, listen carefully:
1.
The only thing that these Rails players pay for is hosting
2.
Until Rails hits the corporate mainstream (there are books out), the Rails evangelists will die using MySQL, until you pry it out of their hands – but if they enter a job market and Rails is common fare – then you have a business base
3.
There are a long list of Rails Hosting Specialty companies - and nobody knows better than they do that the state of the art will not do for highly thread burdened successful applications
4.
So their business depends on getting out in front and looking ahead to providing not just better hosting for Rails delivery – but better tools and environments
5.
Because that’s the only other thing that these fanatics pay for – shareware and utilities – if there is a way to break out functions and add value with Virtuoso pieces and sell through Rails Hosts as extra services – tada.
6.
Please forgive me for saying this – I have always thought and have been told by the early OEM prospects that I showed the Virtuoso Demo to – er… Virtuoso needs an encompassing integrated design time environment to make its power more available. Rails could be it.
7.
Since Ajax is hot, and Rails and Ajax are twinned in the fugitive mind at this point – it’s a chance for OpenLink to lead
8.
Breaking in to the Rails community and hosting services space would be a big win –and there is more openness and opportunity there than the horribly proprietary OEM sector
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