Right before Open World 2007, the Oracle Apps Lab team put together a clever skunk works project, thanks to the advocacy of some senior Oracle execs:

http://mix.oracle.com

Its gotten quite a bit of press recently, because its the only public Ruby On Rails application that runs inside Java. It uses JRuby, running in Oracle's application server, and was launched in less than 6 weeks... the app labs folks were quite pleased with Nutter's little baby.

So what's it do? Well, its kind of like LinkedIn, but the purpose is to have an immediate feedback loop between developers and Oracle customers. Customers can submit ideas, or make requests, and vote on which changes they prefer. They can tag their idea, and comment on other ideas. Several developers I know -- including several senior ones -- monitor the top rated feature requests.

Its still a bit preliminary, it could use better RSS and tag support... plus, who knows if it can scale to satisfy the needs of the millions of Oracle customers. But I'm damn curious to see if it can! It might quell the frious debate about why Rails is rare in the enterprise.

[Rails] has its own particular strengths. People who don't value those strengths aren't going to get it. It's like trying to explain to a vegetarian why Kobe beef is so good.

That might make James McGovern a bit happier...