In his blog posting titled “Is Rails Ready for Prime Time?", Dave Thomas of the Pragmatic Programmers shares some interesting thoughts on how to introduce Rails in your company. He recognizes that Rails is not always the right solution, and some situations may very well benefit from using J2EE or other frameworks. In many situations however, Rails will bring a huge productivity gain, provided that the development team and the company buy into it....
O’Reilly Network has posted an interview with David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails. It’s an interesting read and covers some of the reasons for writing the Rails framework. Apparently David has done significant development with both PHP (which he calls quick-n-dirty), as well as Java (which he calls slow-n-clean). With Rails, he was aiming for quick-n-clean, and it seems like he’s succeeded. He also talks about the fact that Rails is opinionated software, which greatly enhances productivity if you accept its sensible conventions, but may not appeal to people who need flexibility on the infrastructure level for flexibility sake....
If you are a Java programmer and you’re interested in Ruby, you should read this presentation about 10 Things Every Java Programmer Should Know About Ruby. This blog entry also has some nice Ruby information for Java developers. About the most dangerous thing about Ruby is how more elegant and less verbose it is. And this is not only reflected in the core language, but also in the various Ruby frameworks and extensions (such as Ruby on Rails) and the developer community that has adopted these philosophies....
The final version 0.7 of the Eclipse WebTools Platform (WTP) was released a few days ago. I’ve been using the recent milestone releases for a few months now, and they’ve already been very stable and functional. If you’re using Eclipse 3.1 or planning on upgrading to 3.1, I highly recommend that you install WTP as well. If you’re installing 3.1 from scratch, you may want to grab one of the All-in-one packages that include Eclipse 3....
IBM published a nice article on their developerWorks website that compares Ruby on Rails with J2EE. To be more precise, the article compares the complete Ruby on Rails stack to that of a typical Java web application that combines J2EE with the open source Struts and Hibernate frameworks. This is a very valid comparison (Spring and other frameworks would be valid alternatives as well), as both stacks provide similar functionality. There are however crucial differences in the way these are achieved....