Guys,
Thought you might be interested in what may become a viable way to protect your Rails code from reverse engineering in the future.
Two of my (brief) write ups on the subject.
http://thoughtmining.blogspot.com/2006/09/jruby-excelsior-jet-rails-ip.html http://thoughtmining.blogspot.com/2006/09/protection-of-ruby-on-rails-apps-via.html
I own a copy of Excelsior, so my next free-time project is to compile JRuby with it and see how I fair.
The possibility is pretty exciting...I've had to pass on a few Rails projects because we couldn't afford to distribute our IP along with the product, and the application was not feasible in a hosted environment. I've used Excelsior quite a bit in the past, and not only did it protect my code, it sped it up _significantly_.
As an afterthought...I wonder how well an Excelsior-compiled JRuby interpreter would fair against c ruby? That could be a very interesting comparison.
Food for thought.
John
