The first big decision
Firstly, whatever you choose, I would suggest using a platform that is Open Source. This means that the stack is effectively commoditised - giving access to a high quality platform that keeps your costs low today and into the future as you scale out and avoid being locked into the release cycle of one particular vendor. A big plus is that anytime you hit a problem, your engineers can drill right down into platform to diagnose and resolve it. This is a formula that's worked for for Google, Groupon, Amazon, Twitter and Facebook to mention a few.

Enter Ruby
I am of the opinion that Ruby and Rails is the likely the best web framework to use to build the vast majority of web applications out there. Since it's release, Rails has lead the way in terms of web development - promoting the Model-View-Controller pattern in a simple, easy-to-use manner as a way of creating web applications. Whilst that pattern has been around for a while Rails really put it on the radar for web apps. Along with it came a shift from unpopular SOAP webservices to a RESTful service architecture. And so too did easy to use AJAX techniques for building richer UI's because Rails bundled the Prototype library with it from an early stage. Rails has since continued to lead by incorporating the latest Javascript technologies into its ecosystem - such as node.js.

Dynamic Language = Dynamic Business
Because of the dynamic nature of the language, its strong use of conventions and the style of Ruby developers, you end up having much less code in your application. This win in terms of a smaller codebase is also true of projects developed using other dynamic languages such as Python. A smaller codebase has the usual touted benefits in terms of rapid development times and a more easily managed codebase. In particular, less boilerplate code.

Using dynamic over static typing means that you have to have to write automated tests to cover your code. Some developers disagree with dynamic typing and say that the compile time checking of a static language is important. In my experience, this is not so. By writing automated tests to cover business cases I've found that I catch a much more important class over of errors - business logic issues - while also covering the code paths for the edge cases that the static compiler would have checked. One of the ways static languages try to provide some of the flexibility of dynamic languages is through generics. This quickly leads to a type of complexity which I have found is much better, and more clearly handled, using a dynamic language. The clarity of the code, the ease of testing and the expressiveness and power of a language like Ruby has firmed up my thinking on this area. As a platform which has baked testing right into the core of its ethos, Ruby and Rails has lead the way in terms of integrating automated test frameworks into the developer's workflow. And a higher level, it has made it possible to bring business stakeholders and development teams together by introducing tools that allow one to express business features in terms that can easily be discussed with, implemented and tested by a developer. Cucumber is probably the best example of this, which like many other Ruby projects has caused a massive stir in the web community.

And the bad news...
So what are the pitfalls. I'd agree that it is harder to find Ruby developers. Whilst many top tech locations have a massive amount of Ruby developers - such as San Fran or London - Ireland doesn't have those numbers. This is partially because we have lagged behind the technology curve a little in the past. But I'm happy to say that this is something that has changed immeasurably over the last couple of years. There is a lot more developer meetings and grassroots activity, predominantly in those with an Open Source slant. This is a good news story not just for Ruby, but for the whole Irish tech sector. And I'm sure that strong confident Irish companies will emerge as a result.

Some companies do decide that certain parts of their solution are best written in a different language. There are some well tried paths to doing this with Ruby. For example, you can use JRuby to easily farm out some parts of your codebase to Java while retaining development agility for the rest of your codebase by keeping it in Ruby. However, needing to do this is very much the exception rather than the norm.

Building services and deployment
You indicated that you will be writing a service rather than a full fledged web application - another option you could consider is using the Ruby-based Sinatra as your web framework instead of Rails - which is a thinner layer, which some people prefer for building services such as github. That said, I would still personally go with Rails as there are more tutorials and guides available - particularly if it is your companies first time working with Ruby.

For deployment, Heroku makes developing and deploying Ruby apps a breeze. It really is an exceptional platform which sits on top of Amazon's AWS. I would recommend taking a serious look at it at http://www.heroku.com before making a decision on which platform to choose.

So, all in all, my long standing impression of Ruby and Rails is that it is web development done right. It has been the leader in pushing forward how developers and businesses develop websites and consigned the sprawling mess that existed before it to history. In the meantime other platforms have tried to copy some of its features, often less elegantly. As the same time Rails has accelerated the rate at which it pushes forward the web - the next release Rails 3.1 is breathtaking in its feature list.

For these reasons I think Ruby is 'the' web development language of the next decade. Whatever you decide, all the best with your venture. There are plenty of excellent platforms out there to choose from so it's a great time to be building the kind of high-scale web applications and services.

After the welcoming talk, some people got straight down to business, while others took the opportunity to chat and chill out after a long week in the office. Thanks to the excellent organisation skills of David Scanlon of Enterprise Ireland the event sported two rooms - one main room where you could hack away on your favourite project and another where liked-minded folks could get together and have a BoF (Birds of a Feather) session on a particular topic. Tunes were supplied on the day, pumped through Enterprise Ireland's very tasty A/V system, by Luis Bethencourt - a.k.a. Mr Ubuntu Studio (Ubuntu Studio is a multimedia creation flavor of Ubuntu that Luis leads). In the BoF room, Rory Geoghegan kicked off the proceedings with a great intro to the Python programming language. This was followed by Anton Krasovsky's highly popular talk on Erlang - which seemed to bring out the inner developer in everyone and sparked a meandering conversation through programming patterns, architectures and practices of every language under the sun. Anton is the author of pavo.me - a mulitmedia Twitter client for any pretty much phone that supports Java.

After lunch, which was graciously sponsored by Microsoft, Rory McCann gave an insightful talk on Ubuntu's software collaboration platform Launchpad. Laurent Coudeur, part of the GNOME translations team, presented on the theme of language translations. He's always on the lookout for people to help the translation effort (especially regarding Irish, so if you're interested in helping then get in touch with him on his blog, where he also has a write up and more photos of Open Jam). Away from the lightning talks, Halo Labs, which is a community of Independent IT Service Providers, were beavering away on Linux appliances like Workgroup Server & Asterisk Box, with Patrick O'Conner and Russell Davies probably scooping the award for being the most industrious attendees!

Musical talent was a feature of the day, with Harry van Haaren from U.L. providing a really interesting lightning talk on his work in progress Luppp project; hooking up a MIDI board to his C++ based looping software - allowing part of a live instrument performance to be looped on the fly and built upon. UCD Open Source Labs (represented by Alexander Ufimtsev, Keith Byrne, Aidan Church, David Murphy and Chris Duffin) announced their availability to to support Open Source projects by providing facilities for collaboration, project planning and development of Open Source software - check out the UCD Open Source Labs website for more details.

The Open Source .NET scene had a strong presence with Dublin Alt.NET members on hand ready to participate in any conversation that had the mere mention of the words 'design pattern' Andrea Magnorsky introduced the audience to the .NET DLR (Dynamic Language Runtime), which allows languages such as Ruby and Python to run on the .NET framework. Mono hackers Alan McGovern and Jérémie Laval gave a lively talk on the Mono framework, MonoDevelop and related platforms such as MonoTouch for the iPhone and Moonlight. Qamir Hussain presented on A.I. & Distributed Agent frameworks which he's working with at the moment. Later in the day, Rory McCann was back on stage, this time with Larry O'Neill, to give a talk on the facinating Open Street Map project, which marches on mapping the world in an Open fashion. Oh and some random walked in off the street and chipped in with a quick talk on Qt, Ruby and Rails

To round off, again a big thanks to David at E.I. for being such a kind host and also Laura Czajkowski, Jeffrey Roe and Qamir Hussain for helping to organise the event. It's great to have Enterprise Ireland helping events like this, which really boost the Open Source community and innovation in Ireland. Most of all, thanks to you, everyone who showed up and helped make it a great event. The good news is that there's no let up in the flood of Open Source events in the next few weeks with OSSBarcamp on April 17th and Open Spaces Coding Day on April 24th. Phew! Being Open was never so easy!

P.S. While the resulting projects need not be Open Source, a superb sounding collaborative event that's on the horizon and worth a mention is Dublin's Startup Weekend! This could be your chance to get that great idea in the back of your head implemented over a weekend sprint with other techies involved. It's being organised by Sean Murphy and if interested visit the Startup Weekend website for more details.

P.S. If you want to leave your twitter handle to get in contact with others at the event then feel free to edit it into the Open Jam Attendees List

And finally, some more Open Jam pics...

A couple of folks had been playing around with RubyGame for visualising data as it changes on the fly - showing that this framework is for more than just gaming. The XML/HTML parser Nokogiri was also mentioned a few of times in passing, with the particularly eye-catching quote "XML is like violence - if it doesn’t solve your problems, you are not using enough of it" adorning the home page of its website. And the cracking little tool tig was also brought up, which has a dinky little ncurses interface into git repositories. Pretty cool; not least because it makes it easier for newbies to avoid being bitten when they start git'tin.

The downstairs lobby in the hotel worked out great for people to meet up and relax, with most people turning up at the scheduled 7 o clock for kick off. From there we took over the, what has to be said, pretty classy meeting room complete with old style couches and some Joan Miró paintings. Just in tune with the creative buzz we had going on. There wasn't too much talk of Ruby for a while as most people were in stunned admiration of the room. Then the food platter arrived. Impressively, this is when everyone showed off their good manners by looking shyly at the platter for a few minutes, with that kind of "You first, sir" glint in their eye, before taking the plunge and sinking into the pakoras and wedges! Pretty much undoing any good work in the gym from earlier in the day!

One of the funnier moments of the night was when someone went to check the tweets against the (now settled upon) #rubyireland hashtag. Only to find lost rubyists tweeting from the hotel lobby as to where the meetup was on. After a quick runaround the lobby to herd anyone wielding a Macbook into the meeting room, the evening was back on track. We split up into a few smaller groups, with the main walk-through being on the qtonrails - a Rails plugin to simply developing applications on Linux and other platforms using Nokia's Qt framework atop Rails.

To finish off we had a bit of improv comedy from everyone at different closing stages of the evening; in particular Paul O'Malley with his faithful rendition of an emotion beekeeper. And yes now we're straying off topic so it's probably time to go. We'll leave you with Paul's write up of last night's shenanigans

Thanks to everyone who showed. Have a great Christmas and catch ye all in Jan 2010 - surely destined to be the decade of Ruby domination!

Ciao,
Dec