The reason I ask is that I've been thinking about the Java vs Rails question again and the reaction I get from my fellow Java developers when I talk about Ruby and Rails. Generally, they turn their noses up. Ruby doesn't have the breadth they say, it's immature, it's slow, it doesn't scale, it's not an "enterprise" solution. So what exactly are they talking about?
"Breadth": Java has it and Ruby doesn't. There I said it. And quite frankly I agree with it. If I need some oddball service in my app, I can probably find an open source Java framework to help me out. I may not be so lucky in Ruby. But on the other hand do I care? Not really. If I'm building a web app (which describes nearly every single Java project I've worked on) then I don't really give a hoot about most of the stuff that's in Java. As a matter of fact Ruby's ability to create domain specific languages (DSLs) is the power that Rails exploits in its framework, allowing me to express the complexities of my projects very succinctly. It's not about writing gobs of code it's about efficiently expressing a maintainable solution to a problem in as few lines of code as possible. And this is where Ruby and Rails succeeds.
"Ruby/Rails is immature/slow": While it's true that Ruby's been around a long time it certainly hasn't had the commercial success that Java enjoyed and therefore it hasn't received the research dollars to improve it's language runtime. However Rails is getting a lot of attention and by extension so is Ruby. Ruby is in the early stages of running within the .NET CLR and Java Virtual Machine and by the sounds of things Ruby 2.0 has some virtual machine tricks of its own. So at that point at least the discussion of performance can be evenly leveled at all the virtual machines of the world.
Immaturity has also been expressed to me in terms of a lack of an IDE. While I lament the inability to easily refactor my Ruby code as easily as I refactor my Java code with the assistance of something like Eclipse, I console myself with the knowledge that refactoring tools in the Java world are relatively new too. It wasn't that many years ago that I was doing this the hard way in Java. Personally I think this particular complaint is pretty weak. I think developers who are clutching on to this one are doing themselves a real disservice. If nothing else they are depriving themselves of a fresh perspective to object relational mapping and web development because they don't have all the fancy tools.
"Scalability": Well that's a tough one to tackle because of the differences in strategy between Java and Rails. Java likes distributed shared caching (think EJB). Rails likes a Shared Nothing Architecture (SNA). So which is better? Well both have their successes. But to me, the SNA architecture is simpler to understand, simpler to implement and well-proven by the Googles of the world. Fewer moving parts certainly attracts me. There's less to go wrong.
"Enterprisy": Well I dunno how to address that one at all. Because first of all, I don't know what the term "Enterprise" means. I've developed a lot of applications for a lot of users who believe their apps are critical to the success of their business. So does that mean I've developed "enterprise" applications and as a result am an "enterprise developer". Maybe? So am I qualified to say whether or not Rails is ready for the enterprise? Maybe... maybe not. But in any case I can say that I think the IT shops I work for could definitely benefit from Ruby and Rails. I've seen a lot of crazy Java solutions. They tend to be overly-complicated and inconsistently designed and constructed. There is way to much configuration, way too much thinking about "what-if" and not enough thinking about keeping it DRY. Rails comes with a lot of opinions about how things ought to be done and if you can just accept them and go with the flow, you can be very productive.
But it's funny, the "enterprises" that could benefit the most from this technology are probably the people who will be the last to adopt it. Enterprises are big and difficult to steer. Once they get some momentum in one direction, it's hard to get them off that path. Take for example my latest attempt to move from Java 1.4 to Java 1.5. You wouldn't believe the number of departments and the amount of bureaucracy I have to cut through to try and get this approved. All I want to do is use the latest version of Java that was released two years ago so I can take advantage of it's language features so I can write cleaner, more maintainable code. What are the chances that this particular enterprise will ever use Rails? And they claim they're an agile development shop too. LOL.
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