Ruby on Rails et al.
I am an experienced and competent J2EE developer (with some forays into the updated JavaEE technologies). I have worked with most of the big technologies and acronyms from time to time. They are powerful, very powerful. Howevever, they are also big and cumbersome to learn. For a long time, I have taken the stance that the complexity was necessary. You get robustness, correctness, and big industry names behind your project.
Yet, when I was reading through the spec for the Java Business Integration (JBI) API this past week, I was dumbfounded by some of what I would consider unnecessary complexity. Integrating services across a business should not be that much work. Although I don’t know what specific conclusions can be reached about this fact, t is interesting that BEA and IBM, two big enterprise committee members, decided not to vote for the spec.
In a dramatic departure from my previous stances, I am going to go out on a limb and say that Ruby and Rails maybe is capable of delivering most of what Enterprise Java is actually used for and at a dramatic savings in time. I have been reading up on the framework, and I have been very impressed by the power of the conventions-based framework. I see concise, understandable code and lots of freebies. I understand and sympathize with some of the pedantic arguments against Rails. However, that those concerns don’t seem to actually exist as real issues with most real Rails projects indicates to me that most developers who think they are doing Enterprise development actually aren’t.
The features are compelling. You want persistence and you get ActiveRecord. You want MVC and you get a convention-based file/folder and class structure that outlines the distinct responsibilities of the code. You want web services and you get to choose between REST and SOAP (with the simplicity of REST being preferred). You want transactions and you get to choose between service-like transactions that can roll back database state or Object-based transactions that roll back database AND object state. Scalability is all about load balancing your server tiers.
Listen, I don’t think I am ready to be a Ruby on Rails evangelist, but I can’t help but wonder why some of the commercial projects I have worked on have not employed it.
For those who aren’t ready to throw away all their Java infrastructure, I am very impressed with the Grails framework as well.
Tags: Java, Ruby on Rails