Increased adoption of Agile development, open source, and domain-specific languages are gradually converging within the enterprise, creating opportunities for using Ruby on Rails to enhance, and in some cases, replace old and crotchety back office systems.

ThoughtWorks' leading Rails evangelist Obie Fernandez explores the challenges of pioneering new technology and approaches in a world dominated by cranky database administrators, inscrutable stored procedure code, and living up to the expectations of stability established by 30-year old mainframe systems.

This talk includes real world benchmarking results from Ruby systems deployed on enterprise-class hardware from IBM and Fujitsu and gives special emphasis to proven strategies for incremental change and leveraging the power and flexibility of custom authored domain-specific languages in Ruby as the key abstraction layer of successful systems integration.