Ruby on Rails helps Java to build momentum again

January 29, 2008 at 5:36 am · Filed under Events, Java, Rails, Technology

As you probably know Java is not the best choice for small web applications. It has issues with deployment and hosting requirements. We can say that Java has lost its positions to PHP, Ruby, Python, and even .NET in this area. However Java remains the best solution for big enterprise projects.

Today I was watching RailsConf 2007 keynote and Sun clearly explained why it loves Ruby and Rails. Very simple, if you need scalability, power, integration with existing enterprise systems then you can build your application in jRuby on Rails and get access to J2EE. And if your project is small you can write it in Ruby on Rails and get easiness of deployment and simple hosting requirements. In both cases you use Rails. Both Java and Rails win!

So what technology are you going to use for your next project?

1 Comment

  1. Sergei Batiuk said,

    September 15, 2009 at 7:20 pm

    I think that Java has lost its positions to other technologies in the area of small web applications is primarily because it was always marketed as an ‘Enterprise Platform’ and was treated as such. There was (and still is) no clear concept of how a small web application should be developed and/or deployed on the Java platform.

    I believe, however, that Java can serve small applications perfectly fine. In terms of deployment, you can easily run multiple websites on a shared Tomcat instance. Tomcat has the capability to reload web applications without the need to restart Tomcat instance. Resin and Jetty will probably do the job even better.

    The problem is about tools. What is really missing is a lightweight framework that allows easy development of boilerplate code in web applications. Frameworks like Struts, JSF etc. are pretty heavyweight in terms of learning, development and deployment.

    The concept of ‘convention over configuration’ is becoming really popular and sounds really promising. It really seems to lower the barrier of learning and requires much less code to get up and running. But I am not convinced about performance. Let’s see what happens.