crap in the fan

Obie Fernandez, a Ruby evangelists, created a post saying why java is inferior to anything ruby and ruby on rails. Of course being me I can't pass this up.


http://www.jroller.com/obie/entry/top_10_reasons_why_java

Obviously even a ruby fan can read this and see that Obie really wanted to do little more than spread FUD and get his panties in a bunch (and I do say panties because anyone who wines like that must be wearing pink-lacy panties over his squirrel-sized package).

However, his morning-after post showed that he does have some reasoning within him:

http://www.jroller.com/obie/entry/what_subtelty_and_suck_ass


I've been doing a lot of "battling" lately with ruby evangelists about why I still do a lot of my deployments in JEE. I think he has a good quote here:

"Like Gavin pointed out, you can't do an app with thousands of model classes in Rails. Okay, but I'm really not trying to say that you should try. Right now, I personally have no interest in working on those kinds of monstrosities, but to each his own. "


I completely agree with this. Ruby on Rails is great for small, database driven apps that have the functionality of CRUD. Go beyond that and its simply too much heavy lifting and you need to look into something more heavy-weight, like JEE. Most ruby developers I talk to don't really want to tackle the large enterprise projects, they want to do what Rails was meant to do, small database driven websites.

What this is really about is choosing the best tool for the job. Some projects I would love to do in something like rails. Other projects I think I would spend more time trying to get around rails to solve the problems and I need a framework that can handle those requirements.


Of course after the above post the java community fired back. While I'm obviously biased I sort of feel like this one was much more intelligent.

http://www.javalobby.org/java/forums/t101687.html