Comments on: Rails or Java? A Java developer’s dilemma

by: Konstantin Gredeskoul

Wed, 17 Oct 2007 07:09:17 +0000

On java vs rails productivity:

As someone who’s been working with both Rails and Java in the last year and a half, I really think that there are tremendous productivity gains achieved with Rails, when building web applications. Especially when starting projects.

In Java you typically have to pieces various open source frameworks together, and keep them independently upgraded as projects keep moving on. Rails combines design patterns, MVC, persistence and automated testing in a single framework, which is what makes starting a new project so much more simple compared to java.

Java project setup right with right team can perhaps be just as productive, but having to make less choices is often a way to streamline things a bit.

by: Björn Wilmsmann

Thu, 20 Sep 2007 01:07:41 +0000

Being an incredibly young language, Groovy does not come even close to Ruby in terms of maturity. Regarding its alleged performance advantage: Just using the JVM as runtime environment does not make a language as fast as Java. Otherwise, JRuby or Jython would be just as fast as Java, too. In fact, current benchmarks clearly show that Groovy tends to be much slower than Ruby. I don’t say that it does not have the potential to be faster than Ruby one day, however, at the moment it is not.
Apart from speed and maturity isssues of Groovy itself, Grails at the moment seems like a desperate attempt to catch up with the groundbreaking concepts brought about by Rails. It might be a viable alternative in the future. However, at this time Rails clearly is the framework to choose if you want to develop web applications quickly and painlessly. There are cases where using JSF, Struts or some other kind of Java Web Framework still makes sense, though in most cases you will simply end up needing more time to accomplish your work than you will do with RoR.

by: suresk

Wed, 18 Jul 2007 02:00:56 +0000

Robert - I’d be interested in hearing who your host is.

As for Groovy/Grails… I like Groovy, and I think Grails is interesting, but I don’t see how it helps this situation? My reason (in part, at least) for choosing Ruby is deployment..

by: Stan Berka

Wed, 18 Jul 2007 01:52:37 +0000

Actually, the solution to the dilemma seems to me to be the Groovy and Grails. Why?

* performance much better than RoR (after all, it’s using a well optimized Java VM)
* you don’t have to learn a new language like Ruby, but have in Groovy all the new “stuff” of a modern language
* you can utilize all your Java libraries/code without doing anything special, just copy and paste, if you prefer it
* it’s cool!

by: Robert

Wed, 18 Jul 2007 01:45:06 +0000

While there are far fewer hosting companies for Java, the good ones are up to date. I host my latest app at eapps and they have jdk 1.5, JBoss, tomcat 5.5.x, etc. ability to restart tomcat (private JVM w/96mb), etc. Not too bad for $25.

The problem with java hosting is that it takes more work for the providers and most don’t want to deal with it. Shame, but that is the way it is.

by: Robert

Tue, 17 Jul 2007 13:36:25 +0000

I think the main issues currently w/ Java development are: 1) the need to make development time “investment” proportional (e.g. make the easy things easy), which is mainly an issue with over thinking the design (e.g. Seam might be great for big projects, but the amount of setup needed is just overkill to get started on a small project) and 2) too many “me too” frameworks, while some choice is good, it seems to me that there are probably at least twice as many Java web frameworks as needed making picking one a problem.

by: Stuart Clayman

Tue, 17 Jul 2007 12:21:01 +0000

You should look at GRAILS. http://grails.codehaus.org/

It has the best of both worlds. It is rapid to develop apps in like RoR,
but is written using groovy, so all your Java knowledge and skills are
still appropriate. As it is all JVM underneath, you can deploy to wherever
you want to.

From my perspective, I did one app in RoR and liked it a lot.
Then 2 weeks after deploying that, I found GRAILS.
That was a year ago. We haven’t looked back since.

stuart

by: suresk

Tue, 17 Jul 2007 00:09:26 +0000

“…I’ve got to say your assessment of “Java is just as fast to develop with as Rails is” shows your strength in Java and your weakness in Ruby.”

Perhaps. I really do need more experience with Rails before I can make a definitive statement either way. Have you used JBoss Seam though? If it doesn’t make Java development as fast as Rails development, it at least closes the gap quite a bit.

I have to ask - What makes Rails so much faster? Is there something preventing Java apps from being as fast to develop?

by: Sean Bowman

Mon, 16 Jul 2007 17:12:17 +0000

I’ve got both a ton of Java and Rails development under my belt, and I’ve got to say your assessment of “Java is just as fast to develop with as Rails is” shows your strength in Java and your weakness in Ruby. No criticism, but look at Ruby for its strengths, and let go your Java design tendencies. You’ll find Ruby on Rails is leaps and bounds faster to develop apps with than Java.

The reason you’re not seeing Java on the hosting services is memory requirements. Java gobbles up such vast amounts of memory that hosting providers just can’t handle more than one or two app server instances per server, which is just too expensive.

by: evanx

Mon, 16 Jul 2007 17:06:20 +0000

you can get $15 VDS with 256megs - which is enough to run, but not start, JBoss 4.1 - but might be enough to start and run JBoss 4.2 and/or Glassfish?! Cos i heard that Glassfish only starts up services on demand?

Failing that, you can of course run servlets, plus JSF, using Tomcat, and Jetty.