RoR on the other hand has taken a sweet spot in my heart. I’ve read the book, but I’ve not written anything because I don’t have anything to write. My two main concerns at the moment are that RoR is initially only set up to include “one piece of logic” on one URL, if you want to change that you’ll have to start going out of your way. I’ve already done that in the system on my site (http://jocke.selincite.com/) where I can have any number of “modules” on any page (even the same ones), I can create any path I want (as long as it’ll fit into the DB), thanks to mod_rewrite. Unfortunately the underlying isn’t as pretty as RoR, partially thanks to PHP’s language constructs, and a great deal to lack of time; there’s a lot of refactoring and a lot has changes since the start in 2002.

Oh, and whilst RoR advocates “only one language” (to generate any other such as SQL, HTML, etc), my system generates an XML document that’s transformed with XSL - that’s just pretty and nothing, not even Ruby is going to change that. :)

To summarize; don’t be so negative about new stuff just because it becomes popular - I’m fed up too, but I try to stay optimistic :P

I think Ruby on Rails is exactly what the web developer community needed. Unless you are a really skilled and disciplined programmer you will, at least in Perl and PHP, write pretty messy code. This is because there is no rules how you should develop applications. This is of course not a problem to skilled programmers who knows how to write applications after the MVC-model, but I have seen a lot of really messy code in my few years as a programmer. My first applications i wrote in PHP are so ugly that they are really hard to maintain. :)

What Ruby on Rails does is that it provides a well-structured base for you to work on. Well, J2EE and .NET does the same thing, but in my own opinion they both are too big and complicated to learn. I could go on and on about why you should choose RoR over J2EE, but don’t worry; I won’t. :)

Anyway, I feel that there is place for all these 3 types of ways for a web developer. I would never write a simple script in RoR because it feels a bit overkill. To do this I would gladly choose either Perl or PHP. But if I had to make a larger application I would choose RoR since it gives you so much for free. And if I had to develop a great application, like a banking system or something in the same scale, together with, let’s say, 20 co-workers I would choose Java (if I was the one who made that call).

Hmm… I tried to make this comment short and concise, but I guess I failed. We have had a lot of discussions about this at work and after a lot of swings back and forth we have decided to re-build the current system (written in Perl) in Ruby on Rails. Management of course wanted to develop in J2EE (because they all are pointy haired and enjoys buzz words ;) ), but after a lot of pressure from us developers we made them change their minds. I guess they didn’t want to hire a bunch of consultants with walls filled with different Java certificates. ;)

To summarize this: don’t turn your back to the new technology!