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Ruby on Rails stakes out Java's turf

computerworld.com.au — Look out, Java. Ruby on Rails is staking out your turf. But all is not lost for Java, which still enjoys advantages in areas such as security, based on feedback at the Ruby on Rails Camp event, held Thursday at the IBM Almaden Research Center.

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fatmike 1 year 299 days ago, made popular 1 year 299 days ago

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Judgement, on 10/12/2007, -11/+15I still think that Ruby On Rails is great for getting a quick & simple app up and running, but Java is more suitable for enterprise apps that will require maintenance and updates over a period of years.
- noahhoward, on 10/12/2007, -5/+7I felt it was pretty damn easy to update a Ruby App. I'd say the security issues will be what hold it back, for a little while.
- TroubleInMind, on 10/12/2007, -13/+10Java is more suitable to developing apps that require a few dozen people to build and keep running after it takes you too long to make it and the requirements have become irrelevant in the meantime but your sponsor has invested so much money in the damned thing that they can't pull the plug on it without looking like fools.
  
  My .02 fwiw
- puggy, on 10/12/2007, -8/+15Don't forget the lack of comprehensive documentation and authoritative central information. Most of the responses you get at the forums are "Go buy the book", and etc. The wiki at the rails site is a mess, and there is no stable IDE around. This is not saying it's impossible to deploy solid Rails apps, but these things are just holding back enterprise adoption.
- tobiasluetke, on 10/12/2007, -9/+9That feeling is shared by many but its proven to be false. The same things which make rails easy to quick an simple apps make it easy for massive apps such as www.shopify.com. The combination of easy to read syntax and the dynamic features improve maintainability more then any documented process could. Rails applications of bigger size are usually written with thousands of unit tests which contribute further to this.
- hchaudh1, on 10/12/2007, -2/+17Yayyyy....another Java is dead/ROR vs Java debate.
  
  Both have their place. Ruby has simplicity and code beauty (yes that matters) going for it. Java has strong typing, vast libraries going for it.
  
  In the meantime, please note that 2 major Ruby guys have been picked up by Sun. I would watch Groovy real close if I were you.
- podgey22, on 10/12/2007, -7/+11Nobody has mentioned the fact that ruby is just one of the slowest running languages out there.
  
  http://dan.corlan.net/bench.html
  There's another one with more benchmarks but I can't find the link right now. Java performs a lot better than people give it credit for.
- Phocion55, on 10/12/2007, -5/+9"Nobody has mentioned the fact that ruby is just one of the slowest running languages out there."
  
  Misleading statement.
  
  It's not the "language" that is slow....it's the interpreter. There are multiple interpreters out there.....some run better than others to my understanding.
- podgey22, on 10/12/2007, -5/+5"[...] to my understanding."
  
  Which clearly isn't that much. Interpreting costs cycles, regardless of how fast your interpreter is. Java Bytecode is compressed down to the level where you just abstract out platform-specific code and that sits in the JRE. It's great design and works a lot better than interpreters.
  
  If you want to back up your own "Misleading statement", find me a Ruby interpreter that runs faster than Java.
- Phocion55, on 10/12/2007, -3/+7True. But I never said Ruby was better/faster than Java. I was saying that simply reporting "Ruby is so slow" on one interpreter is misleading.
  
  The most important issue, however, is knowing how and when to best implement the two technologies.
- nofxjunkee, on 10/12/2007, -1/+11Man, I hate it when people compare a framework to a language. You can compare Ruby to Java, and Ruby is not replacing Java, and you can compare RoR to [java web app framework of the month].
  
  Java isn't going anywhere, and RoR looks to be here to stay (I think it's a nice framework and own the books, etc), but neither one is replacing the other. Even if RoR somehow became the only web app framework anyone used, there would still be a ton of java systems out there doing nothing related to web apps at all.
- WhiskerTheMad, on 10/12/2007, -3/+6"If you want to back up your own "Misleading statement", find me a Ruby interpreter that runs faster than Java."
  
  Actually, I believe Matz & crew have already started merging YARV into the ruby trunk for 2.0. YARV is a fast Ruby VM, designed to address the whining of pussies who claim that Ruby interpreters are too slow, or not "enterprisey" enough.
- rickcarson, on 10/12/2007, -5/+6Ruby on Rails is a threat to PHP, not Java.
  
  That said, Java is picking up RoR's tricks faster than RoR's is picking up Java's. The latest versions of Netbeans have some interesting stuff for connecting a database to the web with little or no coding.
  
  So Ruby is in the PHP niche, except ... how many hosting providers will let you use Ruby? Java has the same problem, no one hosts servlets.
  
  So Ruby is crippled in its own niche (where it is having the stuffing kicked out of it by PHP), and what it does do well, Java does just as well or almost as well... hmmm...
  
  Then there is the whole 'easy to read' thing. I call BS. Ruby is derived from Perl. Yes, it is more readable than Perl, but what isn't?
  
  In summary:
  Ruby is fantastic for anyone who wants to jump ship from Perl. For everyone else, there's Java.
- bradleyland, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4@rickcarson
  
  If you can't read Ruby, you should probably check in your programmer's hat for good. I'm a project manager who learns the programming languages that my developers will use, so that I don't have to look at them cross-eyed when we talk about the technical aspects of an application.
  
  This means that I am by no means a hardcore programmer, and of all the languages I have reviewed to date, Ruby on Rails was the second easiest to pick up. The easiest being PHP, but that was back when PHP apps were mostly written procedurally, and MVC meant using "require('layout/header.php')" at the top of your page and "require('layout/footer.php')" at the bottom.
- rickcarson, on 10/12/2007, -6/+1Hey Bradley. Thanks for sharing.
  
  By any objective standard you could name I am a top notch programmer.
  
  You chose: number of languages.
  
  An interesting choice. Indicates a certain flexibility, but not necessarily a good measure of ability. Anyway, lets apply your standard:
  
  Toward the end of the 90s I did a CV where I listed all the programming languages I'd actually used in a professional capacity. I had more than 40 on the list back then. And subsequently I stopped counting.
  
  Do any of your 'uber' programmers have commercial experience with more than 40 languages?
  
  If so, by all means let us continue this genitalia waggling.
- codahale, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4rickcarson, seriously: "I call BS. Ruby is derived from Perl."
  
  That is, on its face, patently ridiculous. Ruby, in its first incarnations, was *influenced* by Perl. It is not a descendant of Perl. It is not a superset of Perl. Most of the Perlisms in Ruby were removed years ago. You may as well claim that Java is derived from C++ and therefore requires that the programmer pay close attention to pointers. I mean, curly brackets, right?
- 21chrisp, on 10/12/2007, -3/+3"The latest versions of Netbeans have some interesting stuff for connecting a database to the web with little or no coding."
  
  *point* *click* *drag* *click* *type xml* *click* *pull down* *click* *drag* *type more xml* *click* *drag* *mouse over*
  
  *snore*
  
  *reload browser* *error* *oh i forgot to recompile* *point* *click* *drag* *click* *compile*
  
  *snore*
  
  *reload browser* *error* *oh i forgot to restart the server* *click* *pull down* *click* *drag* *restart server*
  
  *thump*
  
  *Wakes up 20 minutes later* Look ma! I did all that with just a little xml!!!!
- bradleyland, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2@rickcarson
  
  "If so, by all means let us continue this genitalia waggling."
  
  Dude, the only one with their pecker out here, is you.
  
  I just disagreed with you that Ruby is difficult to read. I'd expect such an uber-programmer as yourself to find it easy as well.
JacNet, on 10/12/2007, -18/+4What about C#?
- podgey22, on 10/12/2007, -11/+5Well quite. .net performs faster than Java which performs about 200 times faster than Ruby.
  
  People won't implement Ruby into large applications if they're going to run 200 times slower than their existing system, regardless of how much easier it is to program.
  
  With the rise of cross platform versions of the .net framework (mono) I think we're going to see an even larger shift from Java to .net but Ruby just doesn't stand a chance unless they do something serious about their performance/RAM issues. Ruby is idealist but unrealistic.
- WhiskerTheMad, on 10/12/2007, -3/+8"People won't implement Ruby into large applications if they're going to run 200 times slower than their existing system, regardless of how much easier it is to program."
  
  2 new servers + extras: $6,000
  Lasts: 4-5 years
  
  2 new developers + extras: $100,000/year + bennies
  Lasts: 2 years until burnout
  
  What were you saying again?
- seanmc303, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3WhiskerTheMad, good point. Not only should a application be measured on clock cycles, but it should also be measured on time taken to build the application. I would wager that almost any Ruby on Rails solution can be developed faster than comparable Java application. Deploying a Ruby based application with some extra clustered servers will cost less than the money spent developing in another framework. With YARV on its way into the Ruby language, I doubt that clock cycles will be much of an issue.
- bradleyland, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3Trading machine time for developer time is one of the great little rebuttals used in the RoR community all the time, but it doesn't solve the problem entirely. You still have to get down to the speed of a single Ruby thread, which will run your application on a one-to-one relationship with your user, and I've seen complex actions in Ruby take too damned long to deliver a response to the user when compared with Java or .NET apps of similar nature.
  
  I really, really, really (yes, three times really) like RoR from a development standpoint. We just finished the first phase of a pretty sizable ($50k) project, and it has been AWESOME for delivering a cutting edge application at a fraction of the cost, but the performance aspect is really concerning to me.
mickwalks, on 10/12/2007, -15/+3what about the diamonds? do the get to go on the road trip too?
mailbox125, on 10/12/2007, -4/+15how is it that comparing a language and framework to a language is a valid comparison? i would understand a ruby vs java comparison, but java and rails... wtf?
- rootneg2, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3ack, wrong reply....
- natterca, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2I always assume the comparision is to the J2EE framework.
- rickcarson, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1Which is the comparison being made, but it is quite an odd comparison, since Rails doesn't do any of the 'selling points' of J2EE, as even the pro Rails article freely admits.
  
  If comparing frameworks the proper comparison would be to something like Spring.
  
  Heck, if you absolutely _must_ compare it to an enterprise edition of Java, you should pick Java EE 5, which is _much_ easier to use than J2EE.
- oneovernone, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Compare rails to Grails - grails.org . Grails is picking up on RoR fast, and even though it's an early version it is very mature and stable.
  
  It's built on Groovy and uses Spring/Hibernate/SiteMesh so all your stable, healthy, Java libraries are already there. And it runs in any standard Servlet container/ Application server. It's the _best_ way to go for existing Java programmers/ Java shops IMHO. No migration/porting/interop woes because it's still all standard JVM bytecode under the hood.
  
  So Grails gives you the benefits of the Java platform w/ the terseness of a dynamic language and RAD web framework.
san1ty, on 10/12/2007, -7/+8Just to keep things in perspective, remember that Ruby remains an extremely slow language. Consider that in the Programming Language Shootout (see http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/), Ruby is over 60,000% slower than C (yes, that is *four* zeros), java is about 90% slower.

I'm sure the Ruby crew are working to address this problem, but until they do, Ruby will really only be suitable as a relatively thin layer between the web server and the database.
- hchaudh1, on 10/12/2007, -7/+8While I agree that Ruby will be the slowest as compared to C++ and Java. But those numbers are just BAAAD. That's not true.
- podgey22, on 10/12/2007, -5/+3hchaudh1 what are you on about? They're possibly the most independent source on what performs best; they have nothing to gain from showing Ruby in a bad light. Ruby is slow. Slower than almost anything.
- rootneg2, on 10/12/2007, -4/+9So what? assembly blows C out of the water, but I don't see many people coding in assembly anymore...
  
  If you're worried about speed take the slow parts of your Ruby program and code them up as a C extension. Mixing Ruby and C is pretty painless.
- san1ty, on 10/12/2007, -4/+3rootneg2, firstly, assembly is only marginally faster than a modern C compiler (and then only if you *really* know what you are doing), it certainly isn't 60,000% faster. Secondly, while Java is definitely a more verbose language than Ruby, that is compensated for by sophisticated IDEs which can really remove much if not all of the pain from using Java. A statically typed language like Java is generally easier to debug than a dynamically typed language such as Ruby as an entire class of bugs becomes impossible with static typing.
- mailbox125, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2@rootneg2
  your argument works at a conceptual level but falls apart at a technical level. first off any decent compiler will generate better assembly than most people can write.
  the analogous of assembly in ruby would be byte code. even if a person where able to write the most elegant byte code possible (is that even possible?) its not going to make much of a difference, the bottleneck is in the vm.
- rootneg2, on 10/12/2007, -1/+9ok, ok, so perhaps the the assembly/C comparison isn't exactly analagous. But back in the days of the first C compilers, it probably was quite a bit slower; but C took over nonetheless because it was easier to code in.
  
  It's just my opinion that ease of coding will eventually win out over speed of execution; thus we should be judging a language on it's grammer and syntax specifications, not necessarily on it's current implementation, as that can always get faster.
  
  and like I said, just take the slow parts and code them in C, it just takes an "#include " on the C side, and a " require 'mkmf' ; create_makefile("code.h") " on the Ruby side.
- mailbox125, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2@rootneg2
  its nice when digg works. thanks for a thoughtful response.
- mikaelc, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6@sanity
  
  As far as I can tell the only test in the Programming Language Shootout where C is more than 600x faster than Ruby is the Mandelbrot test.
  
  A more interesting test (for web development) would probably be the 'regex-dna' (string searching using regular expressions) where Ruby is only 30% slower than C. In fact Ruby is faster than Java on this test.
  
  I'm not saying Ruby is fast. But for web applications the difference might not be noticeable.
- WhiskerTheMad, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6I have to agree with rootneg2 on this one.
  
  "I'm not saying Ruby is fast. But for web applications the difference might not be noticeable."
  
  Absolutely. DHH has flatly stated that the Rails framework is not for everybody; if you're a major bank needing 20,000 transactions a minute then Rails is not for you. If you have a major investment in a legacy technology (think COBOL), then Rails is not for you.
  
  Rails is for the 90% of us who just need software that works, and that can be developed quickly. Our business (200 employees, 7500+ customers and growing) is running our primary business app in Rails off of a single Rails server and a single database server. Now that we've got our core software going and the business is growing, we have to money to buy another server.
- decaff, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1"Consider that in the Programming Language Shootout (see http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/), Ruby is over 60,000% slower than C (yes, that is *four* zeros), java is about 90% slower."
  
  Java isn't that slow for typical applications. Many of those benchmarks run for only a few seconds; some for only fractions of a second. That often isn't enough time for Java's run-time optimization to complete its work, and even if it were, you would be including that optimization in the benchmarking. Give the programs longer to run, and you will find Java speed getting much closer to that of C. As we are talking about web applications here, the Java code could be running for days, weeks, or longer - the start-up and optimization time will be an insignificant fraction of the run-time, and the speed difference from C will also be minor.
- seanmc303, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2What? Really! C is faster than Ruby! Wait assembly language is faster than C. Why not compare Ruby to assembly. Oh that's right because developers do not want to shoot themselves in the head after a day of work. Ruby and ROR is taking off because developers are realizing that programming can be less painful and more rapid with Ruby and ROR.
- igouy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0san1ty wrote "over 60,000% slower"
  You have chosen to exaggerate the performance differences by (1) presenting the differences as a percentage (yes, you added *two* zeros) and (2) presenting the largest difference on any of the benchmarks as though it was an adequate description of the performance measurements (as though Yao Ming's height was an adequate description of people's height)
- igouy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0decaff wrote "Many of those benchmarks run for only a few seconds; some for only fractions of a second... Give the programs longer to run, and you will find Java speed getting much closer to that of C."
  
  None of the Java programs shown on the Gentoo/Pentium pages take less than one second CPU time.
  
  On spectral-norm the Java program takes 5.33s and the GCC program takes 5.58s - but on partial-sums the Java program takes 8.39s and the GCC program takes 4.18s.
  How much longer do you think the partial-sums Java program should be run for - it already loops 2,500,000 times?
san1ty, on 10/12/2007, -8/+3disregard
speel, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4As a non-programmer .. i wanna know how you guys keep on top of all this new stuff ruby, ruby on rails, rube and java, etc?
- bpapa, on 10/12/2007, -5/+7They don't. A lot of people that evangelize for one language only in fact know that one language.
- gharding, on 10/12/2007, -3/+3Well, picking up the basics of a new language isn't hard once you know one. It's generally just a matter of learning syntax and convention. If only I could speak as many languages as I program, I'd be the top translator for the UN!
- podgey22, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2They've been around for quite a long time. Plus most new languages build off older languages so they're quite easy to migrate to...
  
  But the big changes to take the evangelists to push it out to other programmers. Aspect Orientated Programming will be with us one day, we just need to get used to how it works. OOP has taken long enough to become mainstream.
- scott2449, on 10/12/2007, -2/+0Also, after time there are shake-outs and only a few languages last the test of time. For example C (in its various forms) and Java are the only two recent languages that are considered by both academia and business to be "serious." The fact is that even on the web all these other languages are spread to thin; this worries executives and professors alike. They worry that any of these languages could disappear, making it a waste to support or teach them.
- WhiskerTheMad, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4"i wanna know how you guys keep on top of all this new stuff ruby, ruby on rails, rube and java, etc?"
  
  Ruby is ten years old. The Rails framework, I believe, just turned 2. They've been around for a while, so they've had time to work their way into the programmer conciousness.
  
  "A lot of people that evangelize for one language only in fact know that one language."
  
  These people are not programmers. Programmers do what they do because they love the work; nobody can last more than a couple of years in this stupid, hair-pullingly frustrating industry unless they love the work itself. People who get into computers to make money are the world's biggest suckers.
  
  Good programmers always have an eye out for the next new thing that will make their job more fun (i.e., take a lot of the stupid, repetitive crap that programming entails). There are a massive number of news and technology sites that can keep a programmer up to speed with the latest and greatest.
locnguyen, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5I've been learning Ruby for the past few months and so far it's promising. I don't see it gaining on Java and .NET anytime soon, mainly because corporations aren't so quick to change. We'll see it a lot more on the web but not in big business until it's proven itself. I'll keep my day job as a Java developer for now.
spyres, on 10/12/2007, -9/+8Ruby spam. Java has nothing to fear from ruby.
- WhiskerTheMad, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1"Java has nothing to fear from ruby."
  
  Except that Ruby currently has the popular perception (correctly or not) of being fun, whereas as Java has the popular perception of being "made for money," i.e. work.
  
  When developers go home to learn something new for themselves, what do you think they'll be concentrating on?
0siris, on 10/12/2007, -9/+10This just in: Look Out C++ here comes PHP+Javascript!
- psylence, on 10/12/2007, -4/+2Who mods this down? This is the _exact_ same invalid comparison.
DevlinD, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6I have never written anything in Rails (done a bit in Ruby but nothing spectacular) and I am a Java freak until I die. I really dont see what the big problem is with people thinking that Java is so complicated....you're a ***** software engineer get over it.

But I cannot argue the merits of Ruby on Rails as a whole. I just recently left my work as they were switching their main product from PHP to Rails and I am really interested to see the results. Just the fact that Rails is provides the most solid testing framework for web apps is almost reason enough to use it. Yeah it gets stuff done quickly, but without tests (automatically updated tests at that) it would be an nightmare to maintain any type of system that is worth while maintaining. I still like Java for the fact that it runs faster and is more secure...but if you have people like Martin Fowler saying that Rails is quality for enterprise apps then there must be a lot of truth to that statement.

If someone were to develop a similar high quality framework for Java though I would still use that over Rails. Yeah there are a few, but none that are as complete as the Rails package IMO.

It still boggles me why people think Java is so difficult though. Its just syntax people.
- abhirao, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2I don't think RoR supporters think Java is hard. I don't think there are many developers who look into RoR that don't know either Java or C# already. (I was familiar with both and learning Ruby was tough since it is so different, but when you get the hang of it, it's a lot of fun). The whole point is productivity not toughness of the language.
- WhiskerTheMad, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1"...Ruby was tough since it is so different, but when you get the hang of it, it's a lot of fun."
  
  This is exactly the point. Java is "work," Ruby is "fun;" that's the popular (and, in my opinion, deserved) perception.
bikebill, on 10/12/2007, -4/+6Java has a huge base. Ruby on Rails is super slick & fun to work with. You don't have to choose just one. Learn and love (or live with) both. If you have a solid background in C.S., the language won't be a problem. BTW, I love Prolog.
- rootneg2, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2wow, Prolog? I don't hear that one very often outside of theory textbooks
  
  I thought everybody was addicted to OOP these days :o)
- WhiskerTheMad, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3@bikebill:
  
  Well said. Except for the Prolog thing. Pervert. :)
Phocion55, on 10/12/2007, -3/+4How can you compare Java and Ruby/RoR and not mention Hibernate?
dc2447, on 10/12/2007, -8/+1Java is dying on it's arse and I have seen nothing to tell me ruby nis filling the gap
hansamurai, on 10/12/2007, -5/+4Except the J2EE platform is used by so many corporations as the backbone to their company. I love Ruby, but it's not a replacement for the Jave enterprise environment.
- WhiskerTheMad, on 10/12/2007, -3/+1"I love Ruby, but it's not a replacement for the Jave enterprise environment."
  
  Why not?
rootneg2, on 10/12/2007, -5/+2well I must say that i'm no l33t programmer. But I've programmed just about as much Java and Ruby, and I'd have to say that i like Ruby a heck of alot more.

As for that whole speed issue: computer's are getting faster and faster. If speed were the only issue we'd all be programming in assembly. Speed of execution pales in comparison to human-friendliness; and I'd have to say that Ruby is very human-centric. If you're boried about speed in a Ruby app, just find that killer loop ( 90% of execution is in 10% of the code ), and code it up in C as a module. Mixing C and Ruby is pretty painless.

"Silicon is cheaper than Carbon" -- I couldn't agree more
- covertbadger, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4These sort of statistics make for great soundbites but unfortunately do not have the wide applicability that many people attribute to them. As an example, where I work java is used for the middle-tier and powers our website (we have sustainable peak rates of a million hits per MINUTE) as well as our publically-accessible API and various other sub-projects. If we tried to do this in ruby, we would bankrupt ourselves buying enough hardware to stay up. The 'write the perf-critical bits in C' argument fails since our userbase is split into many classifications of style and sophistication, and each type of user exercises different parts of the system (the 90%/10% stat is MILES off-base for us), so we'd end up writing most of the app in C. If we used assembly, we might well be faster but we'd be bankrupt because the software would have taken an aeon to develop and first-mover advantage would have long since eroded.
  
  Sometimes, it's the core idea that is critical, and NOT the tech (despite what people like Joel Spolsky or Paul Graham like to think). In these cases, java fits well because it has reasonable development speed with decent performance, and sometimes that middle ground is crucial. Disclaimer: I'm not a java dev myself (any more), and outside of work I write open-source stuff in python, ruby, and Haskell - I just realise that there is a time and a place where java is the right choice, regardless of how much more trendy ruby might be.
- Snuffkin, on 10/12/2007, -3/+3And if the trend continues that way like it currently is, we'll all end up running applications coded in slow languages on our 6Ghz processors that could run at an identical speed if coded in a more efficient language on a 100Mhz processor.
  
  Computers will never get 'faster' if you just keep on sacrificing efficiency for your own personal enjoyment of coding; the applications will just become more inefficient and fill up the increased processing power, resulting in no actual gain in the speed of computing. When it comes to one or a few programmer(s) suffering code that isn't fun to write over thousands+ of end-users suffering a really slow application, it shouldn't be the end users that suffer.
  
  Efficiency is good. I'm just speaking in terms of the obvious here.
- rootneg2, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1meh, read my above posts (in response to san1ty) ; i think i make more sense there.
psylence, on 10/12/2007, -3/+4Hmph, and here I was thinking Java was more than a web application framework. Good work Rails, more power to ya!
- blackhalobender, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0Lol. So true. Compare Java to Ruby or Python or C# or VB.net or something.
  
  Rails to Zope/Plone, Django, Tapestry, Struts, million-other-java-frameworks.
wallen3, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Here's a cool video of Matz's keynote from RubyConf 2006:

http://travelistic.com/video/show/985

He's actually a good speaker!
cwcentral, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1"Look out, Java. Ruby on Rails is staking out your turf. "

Look out RoR, Java's going open source by Q1 2007.

I can't want to see what new tools & ways to develop are going to occur from this...
tehmoth, on 10/12/2007, -3/+1"Java is dying.

Netcraft confirms it."
I hold no candle for Java, but seriously, RoR? The signal to fanboy noise ratio is way too high in that community.
blackhalobender, on 10/12/2007, -4/+1I thought this was settled. Zope/Plone is faster to develop then Rails and is easier to deploy. Rails is cool, and Ruby is even cooler but Rails is just not mature yet.

Java web frameworks on the other hand are only being used because business people are making tech decisions. Also, there are just so damn many people developing for it.
dc2447, on 10/12/2007, -3/+4Can you name one successful Web2.0 startup using J2EE?
- decaff, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1http://tangler.com/
- docbaily, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Does it have to be a "web 2.0" startup to count because there are more than enough financially stable businesses that use J2EE.
- CaughtThinking, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1oh i dunno, yahoo, google, ebay come to mind... lol. oh wait ror has BASECAMP stop the presses!
gr8edchz, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1I'm glad to see a story about ruby and RoR. I second that comment though about the rails wiki. A lot of the information is old and it's full of spam pages. It's pretty useless as it is right now.

It seems difficult to find any good online tutorials that are actually keeping up with Rails development. The best I found was the beta book Agile Web Development with Rails. Many of the examples actually require edge rails in anticipation of Rails 1.2. I like that since it's nice to actually be a little ahead.

Ruby and RoR rock. Seriously, it's really, really good IMHO. But, it seems like the rails teams might want to pay a little more attention to the community home base. Do a little house cleaning perhaps. The ruby forge is a great resource though. Very active.

D.H.H. doing interviews saying that he doesn't care if anyone uses RoR or not because it's good for him and that's what matters might not be the best marketing one could do. That's not a direct quote from him mind you, just from an interview I recently read online.

As for Java... You can have your Java on Trails I hear. Ya Yah..
adolfojp, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2So... did they fix the unicode support yet?
- buzzerzen, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1They're getting there. It'll be in Ruby 1.9/2.0.
- codahale, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Rails trunk currently has full support for Unicode strings, and the next major version of Ruby should have it native. Unicode support is one of those tricky things, since Unicode (oddly enough) isn't universally popular, especially in places like Japan, where most of the core Ruby developers are from (including Matz himself). Ruby has supported EUC and SJIS from way-back-when, and some of the pushback on Ruby has to do with Japanese disapproval of the Han unification in Unicode.
bbqplate, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1ruby on rails is an awesome combination for cooking up quick websites for the internet entrepreneur. ive spent a few months learning the language on my spare time and am now ready to launch my first site. i found it awesome how i can code my senior design project (a site like autotrader with user accounts) in probably 75% less time. the learning curve was pretty rough since i am used to c++ where one defines everything. in ruby, things take care of themeselves.
seanmc303, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1I have developed some substantial e-commerce sites with Ruby on Rails. The development time taken to create these sites was but a fraction of what the same task would taken me in PHP or Java. ROR is still the new kid on the block, and it will take some time before it is embraced as an enterprise grade web development platform. Considering the elegance and ease of Ruby and the ROR framework, I doubt that ROR's momentum will diminish.
Bloodwine, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1I wonder what will be the next hip thing? A couple years ago it was Python, now it is RoR, what will be popular in a couple years?! The people who tout RoR now will then say, "RoR is a toy! It's not meant for enterprise apps. Give LanguageX or FrameworkY a try if you want to do it right!"

It's funny that you don't hear much about Ruby outside of Rails. I've heard it is a solid language, but has there been anything major done that wasn't done using Rails?
FuManchuX, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1I only have professional experience in Java, Python and Perl (so sorry, please tell me about RoR) but in my opinion, Java rules because (1) it's easy to make understand code, (2) it's reliable during deployment and (3) the documentation is good.

1. I've used Eclipse. Prefer IntelliJ IDEA. Both have features where for instance, I can click on a method and see every other place in the project that uses it. Moving/renaming/refactoring methods is likewise easy.

In Perl and Python, I've found it harder; more often wondering things like "where did this come from?"

2. I've run into more problems on Perl and Python apps trying to deploy them on new platforms. 90% of the time with Java, I just need to be sure the right jar file is on hand. With Perl and Python, I've run into more problems like, e.g. some Perl XML package doesn't exist on the host I'm trying to install on (and the program fails so inexplicably it tacks too long to realize why) or e.g. in Python having to compile some special native provider to make DB/2 available in Python.

3. I don't mind buying the book. In fact, very many times it's been worth paying full book price just to get information immediately. In every case I needed, I was able to go to a book store and find something exactly about it, when it comes to Java.

Not so with others... Webware, at the time I tried it, was one of the better web application servers for Python. But it was like version 0.7; and I've have to go look in its code to understand things it could did.

By contrast, I've never looked at the code of provider classes in Java (e.g. Hibernate, Struts, JBoss).
- FuManchuX, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0Sorry about the bad grammar. I just figured post then edit.
  
  Bad choice in this case, b/c I was cut off midway and lost all changes I did :)
  
  PS: anyone finding Digg captchas getting a little too hard for human readers?
docbaily, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2"Look at this sweet program I wrote. It's FIVE lines of code and it lets you telnet into a glass of orange juice."

-Every Ruby programmer ever
- codahale, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2(Digg hates angle tags, so my funny Ruby code wouldn't be syntactically correct. Grr.)
davedavis, on 10/12/2007, -3/+1I have actually had more portability problems with Java than with RoR. On OpenBSD I had no trouble setting up Rails but the JVM required a long and difficult process with many downloads and patches from various sources.
CaughtThinking, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2dave you're kidding me. i know zip about sys-admining stuff but installing java on windows/linux/solaris has been easy. after which the coding on one and testing/deploying on another is completely transparent. either you dont know what you're doing or you're lying through your teeth :
kcornwell, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1What little I know about ROR suggests that ROR is more like asp.net. Right?
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Ruby on Rails stakes out Java's turf

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