Ruby on Rails and J2EE: Room for Both?

Wayne writes "Ruby on Rails is a relatively new Web application framework built on the Ruby language. It is billed as an alternative to existing enterprise frameworks, and its goal, in a nutshell, is to make your life -- or at least the Web development aspects of it -- easier. This article will contrast the Rails framework against a typical J2EE implementation using common open source tools that are regularly found in enterprise applications."

Comments

Stupid

[jlarocco]

That's like asking C++ and Java, room for both? Or, Chevy and Ford, room for both?

Of course there's room for both, and if there's not, who cares?

of course there's room for both!

[Anonymous Coward]

That's like two people standing in a room and saying "is there room for us both in here?" Well, duh, you're both in there now, so yes, there's room!

If I had a team of 50 programmers working on a gigantic site, and the programmer turnover was high, and these folks put in a good day's work but weren't hardcore programmer geeks, I would probably choose Java. Type safety, verbose explicit code, huge array of tools and vendor support, this is the stuff of "joe sixpack programmer".

However, for small focused teams with passionate programmers (folks who program 10 hours a day at work, and then go home and do another 4 hours just for fun, and then write their own IDEs on the side), I would definitely choose Ruby on Rails. Java would just slow us down.

And don't think for a minute that there's anything revolutionary about RoR. This is an old debate: do you create a powerful and expressive "domain specific language", which takes time to learn and understand but allows you to work at high velocity once up to speed (example: RoR)? Or do you go for slow and steady but with a quick ramp-up (example: PHP).

The great thing about RoR is it brings this style of metaprogramming to the masses with a pragmatic language like Ruby. I love languages like Lisp, and they can blow Ruby out of the water, but try and do something simple like connect to a database and you enter a sea of incompatible confusing half-finished code and rude IRC denizens.