Choosing the Right Tool for the Job

Polyglot Programming on Heroku

Brad Gyger, Heroku – Manager of Customer Advocacy

@bgyger

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What’s a Polyglot

A person who speaks more than one language

A person who programs in more than one language

An app or a service that uses more than one language

A platform that speaks more than one language

Polyglōttus (Latin) – Many Tongued

Goals for Today

Grasp Open Languages/Frameworks in “Polyglot”

Understanding of Use Cases Applications

Approach when Determining “What’s the Correct Tool?”

Why It’s Important

Sharp Pointy Tools

Hammer and photo credit: Ian Baker @raindrift

Java & JVM-Based Languages

What Makes Sense, When?

Different apps require a different approach

Leverage Open Tools as often as possible

There may never be a perfect option, but one might be close!

Java: The Goodness

- Most widely adopted Open Source language

- Robust and established frameworks: Spring, Hibernate…and

Play!

- Great for Asynchronous & heavy processing apps

Java: The Badness

- “The SUV of Programming Languages”

- Long in the tooth technology

- Compilation…seriously?

- Resource (time, personnel and infrastructure) intensive

- Ruby / Java App

- Global Reach

- Different Usage Profiles

- Tons of UGC

Scala: The Goodness

- Baby steps from Java

- Leverage the JVM, write less code

- Write more efficient & less buggy code

- Leverage Functional & OOP

- Great for Asynchronous & heavy processing apps (Twitter)

Scala: The Badness

- Mr. Early Adopter I presume?

- Immature Toolset

- Limited Developer Pool

- Learning Curve

- If Scala, why not Java?

Clojure: The Goodness

- “Lisp for Java”

- Leverage the JVM, write less code

- Write more efficient & less buggy code (moreso than Scala)

- Great for Asynchronous & heavy processing apps (Twitter)

Clojure: The Badness

- Mr. Earlier Adopter I presume?

- Immature Toolset

- Limited Developer Pool

- Hardcore Hacker community

- If Clojure, why not common Lisp?

Demo #1

Single Threaded Languages

Ruby: The Goodness

- Easy entre to world of programming

- Even the most senior devs enjoy it

- Large community and relatively mature tools

- Empowers Agile

- Super easy to get started

- “Developer Happiness”

Ruby: The Badness

- Single threaded = blocking requests

- Good luck finding a Ruby dev

- Limited Developer Pool

- Most folks tooled up around Java

- Building on Windows can be a pain

- Ruby (Rails) App

- Started as Team of Three

- Instant & Enormous Scale

- APIs to Social Channels

- Now part of LinkedIn

Python: The Goodness

- Came from Enterprise (Publishing)

- Easy to integrate/extend with C or Java

- Very clean syntax

- Great for Content driven apps

- Myriad of frameworks

Python: The Badness

- Single threaded = blocking requests

- Garbage collection is suspect

- Not the best for CPU (Process) heavy apps

- Tends to be slower than most

- Ruby Front End / Python Backend

- Media Driven App

- Distributed Architecture

- Marquee Mobile App

Demo #2

JavaScript

Node.js: The Goodness

- Server-side Javascript

- Great for websockets

- Very familiar syntax

- Small learning curve

- Holy Concurrency Batman!

Node.js: The Badness

- Takes a lot more code vs. others

- Community and Resource pools

- Immature technology

- Stability

- “Rails in the early Days”

A Large Web Communication App

- Node.js App

- Global Reach

- 24x7 Usage

- JSON

- Serious Concurrency

Questions to ask…

Where am I currently invested (people and technology)?

What are others in my market using?

What is my team using away from work? OR What are

they asking for?

What projects are ‘quick wins’?

Deeper nuance…

What can I use as a differentiator

Internally, what will pass muster?

Externally, what resources are available to succeed?

What’s my use case, and what would technologies would

suit it?

Brad Gyger

@bgyger

What’s Next

CodeForAmerica.org – Extreme Heroku

The 12Factor App – www.12factor.net

Heroku DevCenter – devcenter.heroku.com