As the pragmatic programmer once said: It’s time for a new language.
The hype is all around Ruby and Rails. I thought it might be a good time to revisit an age-old web application (Tomcat/Struts/JDBC/MySQL).
Based on Developerworks article: it seems that RoR uses a tech stack similar to some J2EE frameworks (Container/MVC/Persistence/DB) with room for scalability and maintainability.
Moreover it looks that it is pretty easy to generate CRUD apps with (easier than AppFuse?) – ONLamp intro is tempting.
Digging more; Ruby also has an insight into the semantic web. Not to mention the javascript and Ajax support.
From the wiki’s list of “Real World Usage” – I found a few good app ideas that are developed by one or few brains (Yubnub, Numsum, etc…). Does this mean that RoR let developers focus primarily on the business concepts rather than immersing themselves into development/deployment/config problems? Or is it just a marketing move :-)?
Update: Trying it and loving it:-)
The controller/DB part is simplistic, but I’m not sure about the presentation layer and how it would be different than say JSP. In fact it looks pretty much like JSP. There could be some tags/helpers/etc… that I’m still not aware of – have a long way to go (syntax, concepts, etc…)