JRuby IT survey using Yahoo pipes

Suppose you are all convinced JRuby is the next big thing that will bring an incredible productivity to the enterprise world. What matters from now one is to track the new JRuby experiments popping all arround the world. Every day more and more people are throwing specialized Java libs into brand new web2.0 Rails applications. And there are also of course the JRuby implementation to track. Indeed great expectations, such as speed boost, optional typing, Java/Ruby tight integration, can be put into the recent compiler advances.

So what I did is a simple Yahoo pipe that will crawl the web and gather very recent stories about JRuby usage and progress. You would think you could simply use Google blog search and see the same. Well, that would be a little bit less pertinent. Indeed, contrary to Google, this pipe filters out SVN commits as well as bug reports which tend to pollute Google blog searches. By aggregating lots of sources including the JRuby core developer blogs, you are also sure you won't miss anything important.

So the pipe is there:
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=oCCxOv9w3BGq_aM_1vC6Jw



And here is the output of that pipe (truncated to the 4 last entries only) thanks to Google AJAX Feed API:

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An important thing you could notice is that Technorati and Delicious aren't used. Well actually the problem with those is that they provide feeds ordered by tagging history, not by publication history. So an old story could seem recent in Delicious just because somebody just tagged it.

Anyway, Yahoo pipes looks like a terrific tool for IT survey in general. Analyzing how people build pipes might also provide good semantic information to Yahoo, just like Delicious.

Have fun and feel free to provide feedback or build better clones.

Raphaël Valyi.