One of these homies just got married last month - his good. They also re-wrote their company’s 10-year-old package processing system (most recently in java) in ruby - their good.
Their messaging system, AP4R is:
- LIGHTWEIGHT AND ROBUST, apparently
- open-source
- simple to use
- used by various companies, including their 500-person firm in Japan
- backed by the mascot apar, an armadillo, which is the most important feature
- able to handle “busy” tasks and “heavy” tasks independently, resulting in better performance
- able to play nice with capistrano (deployment goodness)
- testable with functional tests (shortcut but fast-running) and async tests (better tests but slower)
They demo’d a shopping cart application, and the performance gains that can be had by using AP4R to processing the slow back-end processes asyncronously, while giving the user immediate feedback.
There are features planned for upcoming releases! Sounds like AP4R is a living organism, and well worth looking into for the right application.