Let's get the bad news out of our way:
in the course of our everlasting re-organization - it is true that the only thing that's constant at SAP is change -
Blue Ruby, the research project, is no longer.
We learned all we wanted to learn from our experiment and were able to influence some of the newer products at SAP:
- Project "Gateway" is now close to its first release and will expose backend data in SAP Data Protocol. Very early prototypes of this new product were indeed implemented using Blue Ruby.
- SAP now has a lively REST community with lots of projects around RSS, Activity Streams and more
- SAP Business ByDesign lately got an extension language for partners and customers - again, the first prototypes of such a language-based extension mechanism were implemented in Blue Ruby more than two years ago.
So while our Ruby VM itself did not make it to product quality, it did facilitate some change. I must admit that all these good things might have happened anyway - but maybe, just maybe, Blue Ruby can take some credit for speeding up innovation. We'll never know for sure...
The good news is, Blue Ruby is now available as a
community project on Code Exchange. So if you need a rapid prototyping environment on your ABAP development systems, if you want to try if behavior-driven development is for you, or if you just want to see how a scripting language that runs inside your ABAP system feels like: give Blue Ruby a try.
You can expect
- a ~70% complete implementation of Ruby 1.8, running inside the ABAP VM. Whilst 70% is certainly not impressive when you compare it to Rubini.us, MacRuby or especially JRuby, it's already good enough to be useful. And together, we may be able to close some of the gaps...
- web frameworks Sinatra and Camping ready to build your first Blue Ruby web application within minutes.
- easy to use XML/JSON parsing and rendering.
- test-driven / behavior-driven development using runit and rspec - build your test cases in Ruby, then code your functions in ABAP
- and much more...
So if you want to try some Ruby on your ABAP sandboxes (it's really meant for prototyping, not for production use - don't say I didn't warn you), join our project on Code Exchange. You will have access to all of the source code (ABAP and Ruby), an installation howto - many thanks to SAP Mentor
Gregor Wolf for testing the installation and completing the guidelines - and some getting started guides. We'll add more content as it is requested by the community, so get engaged!
Have fun with Blue Ruby
--Juergen
