This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz
by Obie Fernandez.
Original Post: Recovering Data Integrity Addicts and Unwitting Ruby Evangelist
Feed Title: Obie On Rails (Has It Been 9 Years Already?)
Feed URL: http://jroller.com/obie/feed/entries/rss
Feed Description: Obie Fernandez talks about life as a technologist, mostly as ramblings about software development and consulting. Nowadays it's pretty much all about Ruby and Ruby on Rails.
I'm noticing that the variety of voices across the blogsphere praising Ruby on Rails keeps expanding. In other words, I keep finding mentions of RoR on blogs of folks that I don't subscribe to for Ruby information. For example, Alex Bunardzic confesses his addiction to data integrity and goes on to opine that Ruby on Rails is perfect for non-mission-critical apps.
The point is that there are numerous transactions collating throughout the business world that are not so bureaucratic by nature. It would be ludicrous to harness such transactions with a straight jacket of data integrity and in the process kill all proceedings.
Technologies such as Ruby on Rails are a perfect fit for such not so overtly bureaucratic systems. When building solutions for non-mission critical systems, we can relax the database constraints, we can allow for a little bit of a temporary inconsistency in the internal state of the system. We can offer more trust to the human experts using such systems. It?s a win-win proposition.
I get the feeling that the opinion of "it's okay to experiment with Ruby on non-mission-critical projects" is getting increasingly common and a positive sign for the expansion of Ruby acceptance in the enterprise. Especially when combined with the unwitting support of doubters like Michael Yuan, a J2ME guy that opines Ruby on Rails won't replace Java for web-applications. Priceless!
First of all, as the short history of high technology has proven again and again, the "superior" solution does not always win over "inferior" ones. In fact, the opposite is more likely to be true. The question regarding to Ruby versus Java is NOT how much more advanced RoR is compared with Java EE -- the real question is whether Java EE is good enough for most developers.
It's no wonder to me that DHH chose to link to that blog entry in his own blog, Loud Thinking. Totally subversive move. I mean, is this Michael Yuan guy secretly a Ruby evangelist or something? Sure, he claims to doubt that Ruby will catch on in the enterprise, but between the lines of his comments, the message rings true: Ruby is superior to what's out there now.
Ruby and RoR are important technologies to learn in two aspects:
The most important impact Ruby/RoR will have is to drive the innovation in Java EE -- much the same way C# drives the Java 1.5 innovation. We are already seeing this happening.
For people who need to build many web sites quickly, e.g., consultants and startups, Ruby/RoR is a great tool to try out the ideas and get a quick beta/prototype to the market.
So, while I encourage every Java developers to learn Ruby/RoR, I do not think it will replace Java in web applications.
That final advice cracks me up to no end. At least in my experience, Java web developers that learn Ruby/RoR never want to touch Java for web applications ever again. Good times.
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