In Can Ruby Live Without Rails?, veteran Java developer, Yakov Fain, interviews Bruce Tate, a famous Java-turned-Ruby developer who has become well known in the community for his book, From Java to Ruby. Tate tells Fain the five features of Ruby that he'd like to have implemented in Ruby, and explains some of the unique features of Ruby in a way that Java developers can understand.
Tate explains the strengths and weaknesses of Ruby in different programming fields:
Ruby is a fantastic applications language. I'm doing projects now with around 150 tables, a very sophisticated web interface [...] I'd do this project with 3 times the Java programmers, and it would take a little less than twice as long. [...] But all of this flexibility comes at a cost. I can't see Ruby as a platform for building middleware or operating systems. Enterprise programming (distributed 2pc, hard core orm) will take some time, and more investment than you see at this point. Right now, Ruby is a great applications language. I'd expect to see Ruby grow as a rich client framework. But it's not a one-size-fits-all tool.
Published by the Java Developer's Journal, the interview has a heavy Java-slant and doesn't dig too deep into the question posed in the title, but it's still a good read to see what one of Ruby's evangelists thinks about the future of Ruby.
Community comments
Or...rails without ruby?
by Clinton Begin,
Re: Or...rails without ruby?
by Obie Fernandez,
Re: Or...rails without ruby?
by Bruce Tate,
Re: Or...rails without ruby?
by Dmitriy Kopylenko,
Or...rails without ruby?
by Clinton Begin,
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Perhaps the two are simply a match made in heaven. But 90% of Rails could easily be achieved in Java, but would it have been successful? Copy-cat frameworks aren't succeeding yet in the Java space, but I wonder how much of that is dogmatic bias...if it ain't Ruby, it ain't Rails... etc.
Thoughts?
Re: Or...rails without ruby?
by Obie Fernandez,
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The Rails APIs are such a perfect abstraction layer of MVC web applications that people have taken to calling Rails itself a DSL for webapps (which is a little non-sensical). That has a lot to do with it being written in Ruby IMO, and that's the main reason that copy-cats in Java can't compete.
Re: Or...rails without ruby?
by Bruce Tate,
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I agree. The secret sauce is in the metaprogramming. It's amazing how frequently I can be working on a simple repetitive problem in Ruby, and a DSL falls out, when I hadn't intended to write one.
Re: Or...rails without ruby?
by Dmitriy Kopylenko,
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Grails _will_ achieve for Java/Groovy community what Rails achieved for Ruby community, plus more. It _will be_ "enterprise ready".
Just my 2c. prediction.
Regards,
Dmitriy.