Monday, September 03, 2007

David HH Living in Cloud Cookoo-land

This latest little outburst from David HH of Rails fame is hilarious. Even Charles Nutter must be on the floor laughing. David honestly believes that JRuby is a bridge for people to move to the C Ruby runtime because its a superior environment without the "junk"? I had to do a double take when I read that.

So let's see, enterprises are going to give up on a platform that provides monitoring, profiling, JIT, a deployment architecture that isn't a joke, threading, a compiled byte-code format, clustering, distributed caching, transactions that don't suck, maturity and performance all to build Rails apps?

Ignore the enterprise, it is ok. Grails is settling in quite nicely in the enterprise, and everything else will flow from there ;-)

15 comments:

Stephan.Schmidt said...

Has David ever lived somewhere else? ;-)

Peace
-stephan

Anonymous said...

I hate these arrogant people always thinking there is only one good way, and it's theirs.

JBoss' Marc Fleury was among those ... we now know what happened to him ;)

Keep the shields up!

JS.

Okke said...

from the interview: IDGNS: You remind me a bit of Linus Torvalds talking about Linux 10 years ago.

Graeme, you remind me a bit of Steve Ballmer 5 years ago ...

;-)

Brian Yamabe said...

I'm pretty tired of both sides in this flexing contest. Java can have the enterprise application where it's proponents will advocate it rules and Rails can have the SMB where it's adherents thrive. Haven't we all grown up enough to truly believe in right tool for the right job?

Slava Pestov said...

Can you explain what you mean by "deployment architecture"?

Anonymous said...

Maybe when you did a double take you should have thought twice about what he said and could have meant. I think you reaction was more irrational than what he was saying.

Speaking as a Java/JEE programmer, I would agree with the idea that there's junk in the Java platform. In the design-by-corporate-committee, deprecate-but-never-delete world of Java, there's more than one piece of junk to be found.

And there's more than one Java programmer who like to purge a few pieces of junk from the platform.

p3t0r said...


JBoss' Marc Fleury was among those ... we now know what happened to him ;)


Yeah... he sold JBoss to Redhat and became terribly rich?

Stephan.Schmidt said...

"deprecate-but-never-delete world of Java"

Great for people who develop a plattform or product for 10 years.

Ugly for consultants which are hired for one project and usally work in a fire and forget mode.

"And there's more than one Java programmer who like to purge a few pieces of junk from the platform."

And junk gets removed, Calendar is next :-) EJB2 came before that. "synchronized" was already replaced with java.util.concurrent. Vector was replaced too.

Peace
-stephan

Graeme Rocher said...

Woooo.. I knew this post would inspire advocates to come out in there droves. Fun fun.

@Slava
One of the reasons that ThoughtWorks use JRuby for mingle is that the deployment logistics for Ruby on Rails are a nightmare. Anyone who denies this is also living in cloud cookoo land.

JRuby on Rails allows them to deliver a WAR which can easily be dropped into existing containers and will just run.

@Anonymous
I'm not denying there is Junk in the Java EE. In fact there is a lot of junk (JDO, JSF, and the SOAP APIs come to mind immediately), but there is also a lot of goodness

@Everyone
In general this is not a question of Java vs Ruby it is a question of JRuby on Rails vs Ruby on Rails. David believes JRuby on Rails runs on an inferior platform to RoR. And in this he is most certainly living in cloud cookoo land.

One of the motivations of JRuby is to provide a way for RoR apps to leverage all the goodness of the Java platform because of C Rubys flaws (green threads, lack of profiling/monitoring/deployment etc.)

Without these RoR is a no go for enterprises. Which as I pointed out is a space Grails is filling nicely

Anonymous said...

Well, Java IS full of junk and Grails is the new kid on the block - and I have to say its nice to get some fresh air with a bit of Ruby when you've been developing allergic reactions at the office towards we-are-open-source-but-you-cant-touch-it, backwards-compatible-throughout-the-millennium Java.

You yourself is also sure to make your word known in no uncertain ways - as am I - as is anyone passionate about their work. No biggie. :)

Slava Pestov said...

Graeme, I'm not familiar with ThoughtWorks, mingle or WARs. You'll have to explain things more clearly.

What do you like about Java deployment?

Anonymous said...

When lot of code is written in any langauge there is more possibility of junk code.I went through the interview & David never said all the java code is junk.

In his last answer he says,
"I tried to form the best of both worlds to make it as quick as PHP and as solid and clean as something like Java"

So Grails is a solid & clean Java plus quick PHP (Groovy).

Anonymous said...

Wow Graeme, you really need to just let go. I did (as did quite a few Java dignitaries), and I've been loving life ever since. Programming is fun again.

Why do you feel the need to desperately cling to Java. Why the loyalty? You don't owe anything to that platform.

For me personally, I feel like Java and J2EE owe me. I'd like to get back all the wasted time and late hours stolen from my life.

Graeme Rocher said...

@anonymous
I imagine if I was using Java only for web tier development I would feel the same way , but I've had the oppurtunity to explore and use many great Java APIs in the middle tier web tier and beyond

Java is a great platform with a diverse community (3 million developers world wide, 15k people at JavaOne this year) that engages many arenas not the just web

Ruby is great (with Rails) for the web and... umm not much else. If you want to live in a silo stick with the cult of Ruby.

I'm an extremely happy programmer, having fun again with Java & Groovy or is happiness is programming limited to the Ruby community? lol.

Anonymous said...

I started using Rails on a project after salivating over what I had read about it in books for months. I was desperate to use a language (Ruby) with more advanced features then java supports because after programming java since it's inception (moving from c++ & Delphi) I was very bored with the limitations of the language. I am suprised to say that I have been mainly disappointed. Don't get me wrong - it's not bad, but it's not as good as I hoped. I see serious problems with every aspect of RoR, from the ruby language itself to the deployment, but primarily I find ActiveRecord to be , well, rubbish. I tried to convert several projects using Hibernate in descreasing complexity and eventually gave up completely. I am now using it on a small project (20 tables) and it's 'fine' for that purpose - not as much fun as I hoped. However, RoR has really opened my eyes to how web sites with small database requirements should be built and I am now very excited about Groovy and Grails which previously I had dismissed as gimmicks.