Ruby the Rival: What does Java look like post-Rails?
Posted by David November 17, 2005 @ 05:13 PM
O’Reilly’s ONJava.com had a chat with four prominent Java developers under the title of “Ruby the Rival”. Half of them has switched a big chunk of their development to Rails.
James Duncan Davidson notes about the maintainability of Rails applications and the size of the apps that can be built with it:
Can a team write a Ruby on Rails app that performs a large number of features, does it well, and is maintainable over time? Yes. No question. After working with Ruby on Rails for a while, I would be confident tackling any size web application problem with it. But, that’s because I’ve spent some time with it and now have seen that it’s possible to write a well-designed application.
Bruce Tate on what increased productivity means for organizations:
What if the productivity numbers are real? What if you really can get a 5x boost? Then, you can do the work of divisions with a department, and the work of departments with a team of two.
Do read the whole thing.
“Posted by David 2 minutes from now”.
Really? Wow :)
To Stian: Just more proof of the performance gain you get with Ruby! ;)
So glad I found this thread… I can finally close the book on my years of quantum time travel algorithms. Thanks Ruby !
Haha! :D We won!
“It isn’t that I don’t like Ruby, it is that I am frustrated that Java doesn’t seem to be keeping up.”
The questions, however, are stupid: “Has Ruby’s obscurity and Rails’ newness been a problem with customers/clients?” Since when is Ruby obscure?
Oh I hope some MenInRed take over an do the flash-thing that makes them forget about Java.
“MenInRed”? sounds like communist, lol
Keep ahead on Rails. :)
I guess if you’ve not worked with a dynamiclly typed language like Ruby before it might seem a little obscure.
Every programming Manager has heard of Java, I doubt very many have heard of Ruby.
I mean, I think Fowler’s Bliki should probably be required reading for a manager, but that’s not the world we live in. ;-)
While I agree that Rails provides a huge benefit to small software projects (which are about 90% of all projects), there are definitely types of projects which i won’t do in Rails. E.g. if you have complicated business processes it is very hard to map them into (maintainable) code. With J2EE I just use an of-the-shelf BPM engine and I am able to describe the processes in a simple XML syntax. With Rails I would have to code the whole process managment stuff by myself.
While I agree that Rails provides a huge benefit to small software projects (which are about 90% of all projects), there are definitely types of projects which i won’t do in Rails. E.g. if you have complicated business processes it is very hard to map them into (maintainable) code. With J2EE I just use an of-the-shelf BPM engine and I am able to describe the processes in a simple XML syntax. With Rails I would have to code the whole process managment stuff by myself.
if XML synyax were simple we wouldn’t have such an interesting language such as the the yaml-ish pxsl