|
Ruby on Rails vs. Java: An Expert Roundtable
by Barry Burd
At this year's No Fluff, Just Stuff symposium in New York, Barry Burd asked three experts to compare Java with Ruby on Rails—a framework, built on the Ruby language.
Barry Burd (BB): Please introduce yourself to the Java Boutique readers.
Justin Gehtland: I am a cofounder of Relevance, LLC along with Stuart Halloway. We focus on Java consulting training and development. We also do.NET and Ruby on Rails. Whatever fits the need of the problem better, that's what we work on.
I also write books. Most recently I co-authored Better, Faster, Lighter Java and Spring: A Developers Notebook with Bruce Tate.
Stuart Halloway: I am the author of Component Development for the Java Platform and am currently chief architect at Near-Time in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
Neal Ford: I am an application architect at ThoughtWorks, a multinational consulting company. We do complex solutions in Java and .NET. My latest book was Art of Java Web Development.
BB: Many speakers at this conference are excited about Ruby on Rails. Let's talk about Ruby as an alternative to Java.
Neal: Many people recognize the benefits of dynamically-typed languages and Ruby on Rails is the poster child of dynamically-typed languages right now. That's because Ruby allows you to do some things that statically-typed languages like Java don't easily allow you to do. Ruby on Rails is really a domain-specific language for having Web applications talk to databases.
Having said that, you can start doing that now in Java with language-oriented programming because there are some new tools coming out. Martin Fowler coined this term "language-oriented programming (LOP)." In fact, he's written a paper about it. The paper will be influential because new tools are coming out—tools that let you build a domain-specific language on top of the Java Machine. There's a product coming out (based on JetBrains's Meta Programming System) that I am showing here at No Fluff, Just Stuff.
Intentional Software (Charles Simonyi's company) is coming out with a tool soon. Microsoft is doing it with something called "software factories". People have written domain-specific languages in dynamic languages like Ruby, because a dynamic language is more suited for creating a DSL. But now we are starting to see tools that allow you to use a DSL in a strongly type language like Java. I think the pain we suffer using Java and other statically-typed languages is starting to become annoying. People are talking about Ruby on Rails because Ruby on Rails avoids those pains.
Justin: I come from a background where I worked with Spring and Hibernate to build small-to-medium sized Web applications. Moving to a framework like Ruby on Rails I find a tighter coupling in the end-to-end stack. Everything is built in. Ruby on Rails has a persistence framework, a Web application framework, and a Web services framework. Everything is all together. You don't notice the collision of the layers at all. It's a seamless movement from front to back, from the UI to the resistance layer. Sometimes in Java, it's too jarring to move from the presentation layer to the service area, to the persistence layer. And with Java, there is so much to learn about configuring each of those layers independently.
The Rails story is "zero configuration." There is no dump of XML configuration files. All the configuration is in code. You'd never do this in Java today, because it would involve too much coding. It's an anathema in the Java space to have reams and reams of code. That's one of the things that's drawing me toward the Ruby on Rails framework and frameworks like it.
Neal: In fact, Martin Fowler argues that XML configuration files are a domain-specific language. They're Java. That's how we do domain-specific languages in Java now.
New on the Java Boutique:
New Review:
Time Management Made Easy with the Quartz Enterprise Job Scheduler
Why not just use the Java timer API? This open source scheduling
API boasts simplicity, ease-of-integration, a well-rounded feature
set, and it's free!
New Applet:
Reverse Complement
Reverse Complement is a simple applet that converts DNA or RNA
sequences into three useful formats.
Elsewhere on internet.com:
WebDeveloper Java
Lots of Java information on webdeveloper.com
WDVL Java
Thorough Java resource at the Web Developer's Virtual Library.
ScriptSearch Java
Hundreds of free Java code files to download.
jGuru: Your View of the Java Universe
Customizable portal with online training, FAQs, regular news updates, and tutorials.
| 
