Comments on: Rails Rocks… (A perspective from Java Engineer)

By: Dr.Ranjith

Dr.Ranjith — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 13:34:17 +0000

Excellent article Mr. Vijay. There are so many things which we never think about until we come across a problem. This article is definitely proactive in nature and I am sure that many people are going to benefit a lot from it.

By: vijayanandraj

vijayanandraj — Sun, 14 Jan 2007 13:36:46 +0000

I have worked with Hibernate3 and annotations ( I always thought EJB3 was based on Hibernate ). But someway I feel activerecord was more appealing, may be it was perfectively wired with Actionpack.

Question about scalability came to my mind also. But I have not done any benchmark test to confirm the same. I am seeing lots many contents that contradict the fact that “Rails is not Scalable”
http://www.loudthinking.com/arc/000479.html

I dont agree with lack of tool support as “RadRails” was pretty stable and more than enough for most of my needs. Though I didn’t tried the debugging features.

I thought Ruby Gems was perfect answer for packaging rails apps? Though I have not tried it.

Another interesting thing I learnt about rails was, we can distribute rails app as exe(Sadly only for demo, Not production friendly). Just by clicking the exe we can see rails app in the browser (Even without ruby installed on client machine). I have not tried this though.
http://www.erikveen.dds.nl/distributingrubyapplications/rails.html

I agree with you about code obfuscation and IP concern. But my point here is , any code if they want can be de-obfuscated.

By: Aejaz

Aejaz — Sun, 14 Jan 2007 06:25:17 +0000

I guess you haven’t tried EJB3(No XML needed) or haven’t worked with large scale applications. I have evaluated rails & have dropped it due to several reasons, namely,

- Questionable scalability
- Too low level to manipulate the view side(lack of UI components)
- Lack of application packaging facilities
- Lack of code obfuscation which is necessary to protect your IP if you want to
sell your application
- Big one : Lack of tool support

I have more reasons but this should suffice for now.

By: Urubatan`s Weblog » links for 2007-01-14

Urubatan`s Weblog » links for 2007-01-14 — Sun, 14 Jan 2007 00:26:37 +0000

[...] Rails Rocks… (A perspective from Java Engineer) « Techie by Mind…. [...]

By: fixer

fixer — Sat, 13 Jan 2007 04:20:04 +0000

frobot: just one example, i recently used stripes, it is a very clean and fast web application framework. it incorporates well with spring or hibernate and requires almost no seperate configuration files. why would i bother with rails if i have something give me the similar gains with better performance and tool support? Seam is another good example..

By: frobot

frobot — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 17:17:45 +0000

App server or JDK versions make neglible difference in productivity.

Just the immediacy of editing code and checking results, vs. the slow edit-compile-deploy (and often restart) cycle of a J2EE app-server is a huge productivity boost.

The best thing about Rails is it makes it easy to do the right thing, and unnecessary to do the wrong thing. One alleged strength of J2EE is the quality and maintainability of application code. But it’s just so tedious and labor-intensive, that in practice it’s difficult to do the right thing.

Worse, it’s easy and tempting to do the wrong thing — e.g. excessive scriptlet code in JSP, cross-layer contamination, duplication, no unit tests, etc. This becomes a downward spiral — shortcuts result in less maintainability, resulting in more time pressures, incenting more bad behavior.

So while an environment like PHP are often criticized as being quick-and-dirty, in reality J2EE projects degenerate into slow-and-dirty.

The natural state of Rails apps is quick-and-clean. It doesn’t require constant policing, vigilance, and energy to make sure the team produces good, maintainable, testable code.

By: vijayanandraj

vijayanandraj — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 14:30:28 +0000

I dont think App servers makes a big sense here(Because I am talking about the developement time).
I think the ORM in Rails(Active Record), Scafolding (Ajax Scaffolding) , Metaprogramming, built-in-testing etc.. gives leading edge to rails than any comparing technologies. Another feature that fascinated more in rails is seamless integration between web and persistence layer. To do the same thing in J2ee using Spring & Hibernate I can remember how many xml file I wrote. I agree current version of hibernate no need seperate config file, rather we can map it with annotations. But still by following just few conventions in rails I can just declare the class and I can persist it. I can list some many goodie feature in rails, but that may make my reply bulkier.

Thanks for your feedback.

By: afsina

afsina — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 13:21:38 +0000

maybe you felt that way because you were developing under using J2EE 1.4 with archaic app servers under java 1.4? (eg websphere)?