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

I just started it about a week ago

[hammeredpeon]

And I've already written lots of apps that I'd been meaning to get to with j2ee.

Don't get me wrong. I love java and hibernate and all of the powerful ideas it introduces and brings to the table, but RoR just makes things so easy and fast. I don't know how easy it would be to write something huge in it, but lots of my initial reservations about it were shed when I started playing with it.

If you haven't given this a try, I'd really suggest you do it. With this giving developers such an easy time writing web apps, and having an alternative with java that's more verbose but proven and (maybe) more powerful, I don't see any room for .net anymore. Unless you like writing non-MVC apps :)

Python will kill Ruby

[duffbeer703]

Look at this new project, just announced a few days ago:
http://www.djangoproject.com/

Django is basically RoR for Python. When you consider the Java-Python integration options available, plus the larger number of Python devs outside of Japan, I think this is a the way of the future.

Re:Python will kill Ruby

[croddy]

I spent the past couple of weekends working on a messageboard in Rails. I don't know about the "ten times faster development" claims... but I do feel like I'm getting around three times as much done versus working in PHP -- and I already knew PHP, but just started to pick up Ruby a couple of weeks ago. When they say this framework "fits your brain", they really mean it.

The Rails folks are very good at marketing -- but they surely haven't forgotten to put a solid product behind that buzz.

As for Ruby losing to Python? Well...

At work, we're in the middle of re-implementing OCLC's PURL redirection server (which is a tasty casserole of Perl, C, and god only knows what else). With the goal of demonstrating that we don't need our own private copy of Apache (as OCLC uses), a pile of ReWrite rules, and an army of Perl scripts to work with its Berkeley DB backend, I threw together a quick demo using Ruby's WEBrick servlet and connected it to PostgreSQL. Thankfully, I was able to persuade the decision-makers that a scripting language and an RDBMS are a reasonable solution to our problem... but their attitude toward Ruby was similar to yours. "I dunno, I haven't heard much about it, let's use something else."

We settled on Python, which, of course, has its own SimpleHTTPServer which fills roughly the same niche as WEBrick. But it's slower, it dies if you throw too many concurrent connections at it, and its built-in methods are far cruder than those of its Ruby counterpart. I'm going to have to write a lot more code to pull it off in Python.

Obviously this is an anecdotal example... but I just keep coming across things in Ruby that simply make more sense, and just work better than they do in other systems. After a couple of weeks, I'm certainly sold -- even though $PREFERRED_LANGUAGE will keep paying the bills, Ruby is a great tool to have at my disposal.

One nice RubyOnRails feature...

[tcopeland]

...is how it's very simple to put together an XMLRPC or SOAP interface to a back end API. Just put a

web_service_api :MyAPI

in your controller class, and Bob's your uncle. Another nifty bit is:

web_service_scaffold :invoke

which enables an HTML user interface for invoking methods on SOAP or XML-RPC services. Makes rapid prototyping very, well, rapid.

Re:One nice RubyOnRails feature...

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, now let me do that in Perl.

use XMLRPC::Transport::HTTP;

$daemon = XMLRPC::Transport::HTTP::Daemon
->new(LocalPort => $PORT)
->dispatch_to('ClassName')
->handle( );

Wow, that was easy, too. And look, Perl is already installed.

Re:Tapestry and Spring?

[martinde]

You might want to check out this article about Trails when you get a chance. Trails uses the some of the more interesting J2EE frameworks - (Hibernate, Spring, and Tapestry being some of the key pieces) to create something quite like Ruby on Rails but with Java under the hood... In the interest of full disclosure, I know the creator of Trails from my old Java user's group in Cincinnati.

Rails not the only Ruby Web Framework

[gmosx]

If you love Ruby (and why wouldn't you), there are more alternative web frameworks. Have a look at Nitro (http://www.nitrohq.com/ and the Og object relational mapping library. Nitro, in true Ruby spirit, gives the developer choice, instead of enforcing the design of the application or specific patterns. And Og is a completely oo solution that transparently maps Ruby objects to sql (or non sql) stores and not vice versa.