Blue Ruby: A Ruby VM in ABAP
Some researchers at SAP Labs, LLC are working to implement a Virtual Machine (VM) that runs Ruby inside the SAP NetWeaver Application Server ABAP. The project is named Blue Ruby. People have been using Ruby and also Rails with SAP products before. However according to the developers, “Blue Ruby research project is about creating an enterprise-ready dynamic language environment for the programming language Ruby that runs inside the ABAP Virtual Machine”. Read more in the PDF about Blue Ruby. Although it may not be that appealing to people outside the SAP realm, it’s always good to see Ruby running on yet another platform. The world domination plan is progressing as usual.
Comments
This is good news indeed. The Ruby VM is inside the ABAP call stack (or VM) And the ruby code is compiled into some sort of bytecode using a ruby compiler( called BRIL- Blue Ruby Intermediate Lang ) and then that bytecode is executed by the ruby VM.
Are we sure this isn’t an April Fool’s joke? The links that were originally posted on ruby-talk were all dead when I tried them.
I don’t think it’s a April Fools joke. I got the link on Twitter from the guy who commented first. He found it in a podcast Enterprise Geeks Podcast. Check this link from SAP too.
The web pages are slow, and sometimes do not respond, but I visited all of them (to check of course, I have nothing to do with SAP products). All resources seems to be having pre-April 1st dates. Either that or we all got hit by a well planned joke (which deserves it BTW). :)
Hey hey this is not a April Fools Joke. The guy who started is conducting this presentation. Go see for your self.
http://fora.tv/2008/05/21/The_Ruby_Way_to_Talk_to_SAP_Business_Applications#chapter_01
Aparently, this is not a April Fools joke. Here’s a link of Juergen Schmerder speaking about Blue Ruby (check Chapter 02).
Thanks Thilanka for the link.
This seems significant…a big time company making a bet on Ruby. Peter Cooper…this sounds like great fodder for an interview/writeup on rubyinside.com ;-)
Angry Norm is angry when the consultants start targeting his niche language.
Ruby is ‘enterprise-ready’ already. Ruby is not Java, we don’t want your marketing driven, acronym/abbreviation saturated enterprise level grift-ware.
Now get off my lawn!
I’ve only just started looking at SAP and ABAP but does this mean that we can create desktop apps using Ruby?
What are the practical implications of this development?
ABAP is the main and proprietary programming language e.g. for extending or modifying functionality in SAP modules. It’s highly specialized for this purpose and thus not too good a fit for the SAP Web application server. To improve this (and get more devs to work with it), Java was introduced as an alternative. And now Ruby. Yet - correct me if I’m wrong - even if this survives experimentation and gets adopted this doesn’t mean that we can start working on SAP modules in Ruby.
By the way: If you have to work with data from SAP in an ActiveRecord like fashion, you can use their RFC mechanism with the sapnwrfc gem:
http://raa.ruby-lang.org/project/sapnwrfc
Post a comment