“One of the attractive things about Rails (once you get used to it) is the conventions that are assumed around the application.” What I like about Rails is that it showcases the poswer of domain languages and domain environments. When you build up a language and a runtime to your problem you can express the programs that you write ontop of it in a much more concise way.

Of course, doing so limits you to the expressibility in the domain language that you have created. So you can get into the case where you are limited by your assumptions. You will see “My analysis is that if you play in the Rails sandbox, life is good. As soon as you need to break out and do something to distinguish your application from everyone else’s, you find yourself making compromise after compromise to keep from deRailing.” Nothing is perfect.

I agree with Tony’s scripting ideology. I think that front-ends need that flexibility and JSP just doesn’t cut it. I don’t want to spend a lot of time on configuration. I just want things to work.

One of my systems uses Hibernate now and I really wish that it didn’t. It seems like a heavy handed answer to a question that no one asked.

I don’t do a lot of web development so I’m not sure what the answer is but I’m pretty sure it is not Java. Back end, sure… an http interface into a system, sure, front end, no way.

I wish RoR the best of luck though… I’m trying to start a new side project using Java/Spring/Hibernate and I’m shocked to find that getting started with these technologies is _more difficult_ than it was doing J2EE programming 5 years ago. wtf?! This is progress?

What do I mean? Well, I can use the JVM as a host. The JVM gives me a well defined target for management as well as a large selection of APIs. On top of that I can define a number of different runtimes and host my applications there. Basically, I can create domain runtimes.

The runtime may contain a java class conforming to a rigorous interface. The runtime may contain a rules engine such as jess with the entire application living within jess. Or, the runtime can consists of scripts written in python, ruby, scheme, etc…

The magic is in the runtime and how it communicates with the outside world. Once you have that, you can write your applications without touching another line of java sans for a call to a java api that you make available through your runtime.

They’re getting really close to having rails running in jruby.

More than anything, you can actually have fun with scripting languages. Java’s too much like a job. Our son come home on Friday talking about how in “geek club” they were learning about C++. My first inclination (which I held back on) was to say “what are you learning that for when Python, PHP, and Ruby are out there?”.