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Comment by nobleach | Hacker News Reader

Back in 2013, when I worked for the Federal Gov, JRuby was the best way to get Ruby on Rails apps to run in a Windows-only world. I absolutely love the work that folks like Charles do!

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Great to hear it! JRuby has always tried to be the best "JVM Ruby" it can be, which means we've spent more time getting things like Rails to run inside a normal JVM or application server than anyone else. I don't see that changing going forward...if you want to run a standard JVM, JRuby's the only game in town.

Feds used Rails? That's neat!

If you don't mine telling, were you a contractor or like a permanent dev? I'm very surprised that feds would choose Rails for projects. Maybe for prototypes or in house stuff or whatever.

Anyways, cool!

Can’t say for the US government, but a lot of GOV.UK (including all of the content pages, and some of the services) are built using RoR.

I was a contractor for the Forest Service at the Remote Sensing Application Center in Utah. The Rails tools were mostly internal... but yup, I lobbied hard to be allowed to write something other than PHP, C#, or Java.

Federal Government does not necessarily equal cool FBI agents with suits and trenchcoats.

But, still very cool yeah!

Ha, yeah, FAR from "cool". But we did deal with some cool satellite imagery, and I can confirm, the earth is indeed roundish.

Well, I'd expect more people associate federal jobs with the movie Office Space or the "hustle" of their local DMV.

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