I took up Ruby and Rails about 5 months ago. I did so more along the
lines of why I took up JSF. I wanted to take a serious look and be
able to say with authority that I either liked or disliked it. I was
a skeptic at first. I said all the same things that you hear most
java folks chattering about. "Oh, I prefer doing things this way or
that way" ... however, when it's time to put up or shut up, RoR
simply kicks the sh## out of anything else I've ever tried.
My primary income comes from enterprise java development with clients
who dictate everything from what language to what IDE we use. That's
fine, they pay the big bucks, so they can have whatever they like.
However, for all of my other (typically smaller) clients, who do not
care whether it's php or ruby, RoR is my tool of choice. I can work
about 4 to 5 times the speed without even using an IDE.
It's a real challenge to stay on top of everything that's happening
with RoR right now. New developers are pouring into RoR daily from
all walks of development. Java, PHP, Python, and many others. The
RoR mailing list gets close to 300 messages on a slow day and it's
only getting worse.
I'll probably always be doing something in Java, at least for the
foreseeable future. Since that's where a lot of my income currently
comes from.
If you ever do get the Agile Web Development with Rails book or pdf
and build the Depot app along with the book, you'll be asking
yourself why anyone does anything other than Rails. You've been warned!
--
James Mitchell
The Ruby Roundup
http://www.rubyroundup.com/
On Mar 19, 2007, at 4:41 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Now this is an interesting thread! I attended NFJS this weekend
here in St
Louis, and there was no buzz around Struts whatsoever. In fact, most
presenters (and the "expert" panel) even downplayed Java and
described it as
a language that was no longer productive enough for their
companies. It was
Groovy, Grails, JRuby and the other dynamic languaages that took
center
stage. Java Script and its big three libs were all the rave. I
honestly
felt like the odd man out when I asked if folks had looked at S2.
They said
"why would we want to do that?"
I'm with Ted here. We should be able to "wrap the stack" so a mere
mortal
developer might get an S2 Hello World application running in less
than a
week. I don't know much about AppFuse, but it seems reasonable that a
"click here to build app" could be written that includes Tomcat &
S2 ready
to roll. I know there are many Struts Classic apps out there, and
rather
than watch folks navigate away, we should be paving the way to S2.
Just my two cents.
Scott Stanlick
On 3/19/07, Greg Reddin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On 3/19/07, Ted Husted <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> To me, the attractive thing about Ruby is that it's a full
stack. We
> can code in Ruby, soup to nuts ("turtles all the way down"), and
the
> Rails framework provides an interesting way to generate starter
> applications.
>
> With Java and JavaScript integration, we're on the cusp of having a
> JavaScript middleware stack. Writing Actions in JavaScript is a
> trivial step. All we need is something like iBATIS written in
> JavaScript to go with that. We already have an iBATIS for Ruby, why
> not an iBATIS for Rhino?
This probably will make me less employable as the years wear on,
but I
find
that I just don't like the more dynamic languages (or scripting
languages
or
whatever you want to call them). It's not an ego thing like I
think it's
a
"tinkertoy" or anything like that. I think any of those could be
enterprise-capable if they are not already. But it's a
personality thing
for me. I like to have a compiler to tell me some things are
wrong before
I
ever run the code. I like to be able to say "This is a String",
"This is
an
int", "This is a cat", or whatever and for the compiler to
complain if I
try
to use an int as if it were a cat. I also like to be able to
create ways
to
turn an int into a cat if my program finds it useful.
I'm really not interested in getting something going very quickly
(I did
use
the word "unemployable"). I prefer to be able to build something
that has
flexibility, that can change as the users' needs change. It may take
longer
to build up front, but in the long run, it can grow more quickly.
Again,
you can do all that with the dynamic languages. I just think Java is
cleaner. The thing that attracted me to Java in the first place
is that
it
had the preciseness of C++ but a much cleaner approach to object-
oriented
design and less ambiguity about many things (esp. pointers). In a
word,
it's easy (for me) to learn, yet powerful and flexible. The best
thing is
it tells me when I am wrong better than the dynamic languages.
In art class I always liked the slow, tedious, detailed drybrushing
methods
much better than quick watercolor painting :-) Give me time and I
may
come
around. I could get into JavaScript a lot quicker than Ruby. I
could
even
fall in love with Ruby, but I'm not there yet at all....
Greg
--
Scott
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