Business & Technology Nexus

Late last year I began recovering from all the Oracle technology cool-aid I’d read, repeated, and internalized. And as I mentioned previously, I began to recoil from the complexity of Java. Imho some of the IDE’s around Java simply make it worse – a complex wrapper around a verbose language. And before the flame mails roll in from the Java faithful, I’ll pre-empt them by saying a lot of people are doing great things with the language, including the team I admire over at Alfresco. But moving on…

I was surprised how far Microsoft had come with their .Net infrastructure – it’s really good stuff. In fact, hats off to Microsoft on IIS too while I’m at it. (Now why can’t some of the .Net or IIS people work on crappy Internet Explorer – I mean, come on, no transparent png support until IE7?)

Beyond Redmond’s wares, I was surprised to see PHP was now more of a real/serious language too, with much better OO support. Python seemed excellent & gaining momentum also. Many long-time open source advocates predict it will eventually eclipse the other open source scripting languages.

Intuitively (read: I can’t prove it) I began to believe the web applications infrastructure race wasn’t between Microsoft .Net and Java (which admittedly is a horrible apple vs. oranges comparison), but instead between Microsoft .Net and the best open source framework for for developing web applications. And increasingly I believed an object-oriented script language would be a better choice within whichever open source framework won out.

Now, I’m not sure if Ruby is that language. Further, I’m not sure whether Rails will be an open source application framework to rival .Net. But Ruby on Rails has worked incredibly well for us. The productivity gains vs. what I had come to expect at Oracle were shocking and continue to be amazing.

It is clean. It enforces MVC. It’s fairly powerful. We like it a lot.

I first traded emails with David Heinemeier Hannson back in December asking for his advice on whether Ruby on Rails was ready for enterprise software. And I have to say so far it’s been absolutely great. Thank you David!

If you haven’t tried Ruby on Rails or the Ruby language, I’d definitely recommend you give it a shot. And to you Java developers, don’t worry – from what I’ve seen you can make an easy transition to Ruby on Rails. But beware, you may not want to switch back!