Property portal Realestate.com.au has been re-engineered from the ground up with its legacy Perl codebase being replaced with Java and Ruby on Rails.

In the world of enterprise programming, the mainstream is broad and deep. Code is written predominantly in one of a few major languages. For some shops, this means Java; for others, it's C# or PHP. Sometimes, enterprise coders will dabble in C++ or another common language used for high-performance tasks such as game programming, all of which turn around and speak SQL to the database.

Microsoft's open source IronRuby and IronPython projects are shrouded in a dubious future as the last of the full-time IronRuby developers departed the company last month.

Ruby, the popular open source dynamic language, is making headway not only on Java but also on the Windows and Mac platforms.

Anyone finding Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) subscriptions a tough sell for management used to Microsoft's one-time license fee for Windows must emphasize that there are more factors to be considered, chiefly return on investment, Red Hat officials said Friday.

Web application development reached a new paradigm with the release of Ruby on Rails back in 2004. Ruby on Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson has since been at the helm of one of the most successful and popular open source software development projects. Ruby on Rails, or just Rails, has allowed thousands of developers to create complex applications rapidly in a consistent manner. Open Source Identity catches up David Heinemeier Hansson to find out what the early days of Rails was like and what the future holds.