Hi all.

I'm looking for evidence to present Ruby as a suitable language for 
"enterprise" development. By that I mean building large, robust 
solutions, typically interfacing with legacy systems, often with an 
asynchronous and/or distributed flavour.

The reason for this is that I work for a software development 
consultancy where I predominantly use Java and J2EE (or C# and .Net) in 
my day job, and Ruby for all my hobby projects. And I'd love to be using 
Ruby for "proper" projects too! I am lucky enough that if I can put a 
good case together, there is a chance someone will want to hear it, so 
that's what I'm going to do.

The sort of thing I am after is:
- stories of any large-scale Ruby project successes
- projects/utilities that would help enable these sorts of projects (I'm 
already looking on RAA but any pointers would be useful)
- reasons why a client might choose Ruby if it were simply a choice of 
which language would best deliver a project.

I'm happy to take any of this out of ruby-talk if people think it OT - 
I'm just interested in presenting a fair case for Ruby. I don't want to 
over-hype it but I do want to know if it can do more than the (hugely 
productive) stuff I already know about.

I'm not trolling - I don't want any "Ruby is better than xxx because..." 
otherwise it just descends into flaming.

Also, I'm a huge fan of TDD and I've already been using the Test::Unit 
stuff extensively and with very pleasing results (very simple code base 
doing quite complicated things). So any thoughts along XP/TDD lines are 
more than welcome.

Cheers,
-- 
Dan North
http://www.thoughtworks.com