I’ve been wanting to dive into Ruby on Rails for nearly a year now since I saw that amazing 15 minute demonstration on the official site. I’ve known for a long time now that there is something really wrong about the repetitiveness of the code we’ve had to write in Java/JSP everytime we update an object model or change an interface.
It must have been the code God trying to tell me something this week. First Brian on Tuesday and then Mike on Thursday asked me if I had looked into into the Ruby on Rails yet. I had read a few articles about the framework… well, to be honest I only scanned them. My first impression was that it was a lot of hype over a glorified hack to a version of perl. But now that I’ve actually spent a bit of time reading over the beautiful site and and watching the 15 minute intro video I’m very entrigued.
A few months ago I forced myself to spend some time with Python because I had read one too many blogs agreeing that Python cuts development time by 75% over Java. The thing that turned me away from Python was the lack of a good web application (like JSP for Java).
I’m still very wary of switching to Ruby for reasons such as a lack of pre-configured webhosts. My current dedicated host ships all servers configured for php. Thats not such a big one because I already have to install Resin. I’m still not convinced that I could give up the power of Java for a scripting language. For instance, I currently use PHP extensively for quick, simple, dynamic interaction with the end user. It is extremely fast, its quick to develop, it runs on every platform, and it scales big time. However I recently spent a few days trying out the PHP port of Jakarta Torque known as Propel. (Torque and Propel are a object database mapper persistence layer). While Torque performs extremely well, Propel does not. The problem is that the code generated by the Propel generator is quite large. Most classes are 800+ lines. This is no problem for a language like Java that is compiled into bytecode but for a script language like PHP the overhead of simply including one class file is 400 milliseconds. Ugg.
Will Ruby suffer the same constraints? Will Ruby be difficult to adapt to SEO practices? I doubt it. The simple fact that it plays nicely with Apache tells me that mod_rewrite should be no problem.
