Should Rails come with a Warning Sticker?

I've been a Java Developer for about 9 years, and maybe my interest is finally waning or maybe the lack of productivity is starting to get to me but maybe, just maybe, something else is has come along that has shown me a better way... I suspect that something is Ruby on Rails.

Now I'm not saying Rails is perfect or that Rails is an appropriate solution for every problem but as I said to someone else last week, it amazes me how many of the things that I've written these past 9 years would be appropriate for Rails.

One of the things that tends to annoy me is that every Java development shop is maddeningly different. They all have a different combination of open source and commercial frameworks. I've dealt with Struts, Hibernate, Spring, JSF, Tomcat, OC4J, Spring, JBoss, Weblogic, TopLink, EJB, JSP, JSTL, DOM4J, JAXB, Swing, Tiles, Facelets, etc, etc. Now while some will say (and yes I'm sure I've used this argument in the past) that the Java community is vibrant and constantly pushing the state of the art, sometimes I wish there wasn't so much choice. Some consistency would be quite nice.

Secondly, why does each shop have to have its own collection of "clever" Java developers who feel they need to endow the poor developers that follow them with some fascinatingly weird framework of their own? Why can't these guys just build a straightforward solution with the frameworks they've chosen? They all seem to feel this overwhelming urge to hide what they're doing behind layers and layers of abstraction, abstraction that usually involves one implementation. For crying out loud if you're going to abstract away Hibernate's API behind your own, you better have a darn good reason and it better not be "just in case".

Rails is a breath of fresh air. David Heinemeir Hannson has said he's very "opinionated" and that may tend to put some people off, but the strength of his character has allowed a single vision to shine through. Rails isn't littered with a pile of abstraction because it's not needed. It's simple, it's straightforward and it's productive. As a Java developer someone should have told me that Rails was so revolutionary. Now when I write Java web applications I'm constantly thinking about how much better it could be with Rails. Is the grass just greener on the other side? Maybe, but either way Rails should have come with a warning sticker. It's addictive.