Tuesday July 15, 2008 06:00 PM
(America - Chicago)
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Lewis Tower Ballroom (Beane Hall)
Loyola University of Chicago
820 N Michigan Ave
Chicago, IL 60611
Map address automatically

The strangler software pattern gets its name from the tree-strangling
vines of the Amazon rain forest. These seemingly benign vines grow up
the trunk of an established tree and over many years the tree is
systematically consumed and destroyed, leaving a magnificent growth of
vines where the tree once stood.
The pattern that is the software equivalent of the vine helps a code
base transition from an old crusty architecture by systematically
replacing it. The cardinal rule being that new code cannot call into
the old, only the other way around. If a new feature requires
behavior from the old code, the old code must be ported.
With JRuby enabling Rails on the JVM a similar approach can be taken.
A java web application framework stack, let’s say Struts and
Hibernate, can have its view components systematically replaced by
Rails without ever stopping new feature development. With Struts
consumed we can set our sights on the model – systematically replacing
Java classes with Ruby ones and Hibernate persisted objects with
ActiveRecord models. Eventually leaving us with a super-productive,
magnificent, Rails ecosystem to live within.
This talk will cover JRuby integration with Java and running Rails in
the JVM, concluding with the port of a simple Struts / Hibernate app
to Rails. The audience should leave with all the knowledge necessary
to port their own applications to Rails.