This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Java Buzz by dion. Original Post: Better, Faster, Lighter Ruby Feed Title: techno.blog(Dion) Feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/dion Feed Description: blogging about life the universe and everything tech Latest Java Buzz Posts Latest Java Buzz Posts by dion Latest Posts From techno.blog(Dion)

Justin Gehtland, co-author of Better, Faster, Lighter Java, has blogged about his experience porting an application running on a Java stack (Java/Spring/Hibernate/JSTL stack), to Ruby on Rails.

On speed of development

First of all, I’ve been able to re-implement 80% of the functionality in just under four nights of work. Some of that most assuredly has to do with the fact that I understand the domain pretty thoroughly by this point. But a lot of it has to do with the sheer productivity of the framework.

On the dev cycle

Secondly, implementating changes and running tests takes no time whatsoever. The configure, compile, deploy, reset cycle for running tests is time consuming on my original stack, and non-existent with Rails. This particular facet caught me off guard; I wasn’t expecting that to make much of a difference to the overall experience.

On performance

Rails is actually faster.

At runtime, the Rails implementation is at least as fast as the original stack in almost every case, and for a not-insignificant portion of actions, actually performs better. I haven’t run benchmarks yet, but I will as this effort progresses, but I was shocked (shocked, I say) to discover this.

Now, this is certainly anecdotal, and hasn't been run under any load tests or what have you.

A lot of Java guys poo-poo this idea, since "Ruby doesn't have good threading support" etc. Actually, due to the way FastCGI does its work working a Ruby process to a thread, Rails can absolutely scale.

Maybe Justin will be writing a new shorter Better, Faster, Ligher Java?

Page One: @see Ruby

;)