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

[keesh]

Except that python doesn't even come close to ruby in terms of power. Try implementing Rails' 'belongs_to' in python... It's when you start to do neat tricks like this that the advantages of having real higher order classes (as opposed to the python Klass hack) and real higher order functions (as opposed to what python laughingly calls lambda) shows up.

Re:Python will kill Ruby

[CatGrep]

ruby is just too obscure!

Damn! Wish I would've known that before I decided to learn Ruby because of all the good things I was hearing about it. But now you tell me it's obscure! Man, I feel so betrayed by all those people who were telling me about how great Ruby is. I had no idea all those people (some with some pretty impressive credentials like the Pragmatic Programmers, the creator of Ant, etc.) were trying to lead me astray. My coworker was showing me how much more productive he was programming in Ruby - was that all just an act? Well, it just proves that you just can't trust anyone these days, eh? Damn!

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.

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.

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.