Getting Agile

So, I got this idea for a service and decided to create a web site for exposing it. After looking around for a bit at the ISPs who supported Java servlets I decided that none of the ones I could find met my financial and feature goals. But I did find a healthy amount of support for Ruby which I find to be a better choice than PHP or PERL for my own web development style. This is entirely a programming style decision and not a Ruby kicks PHP and PERL ass type of thing.

Since I had some understanding of dynamically typed languages I figured that development with Ruby would be quite simple. I started out my quest for creating a development environment on my laptop at the main Ruby and Ruby on Rails sites. Very soon I got into the tutorial on installing Ruby and Ruby on Rails with Apache. After tracking down a few Apache/Ruby configuration and MySQL database connection issues I was up and running.

Ruby on Rails seems like an easy platform to develop on but I do not see much improvement over Java web application development in it‘s ease of use. I can usually get a new application up and running using Maven 2 and it's web application archetype within minutes. Plus I can add web framework dependencies to my POM (Project Object Model) very similarly to how I would use gem in Ruby. If I use the Maven Jetty 6 plugin with the Maven 2 Eclipse plugin I can get instant reload of my application using my favorite web framework upon saving a file in Eclipse.

Overall my opinion of Ruby is somewhat neutral in terms of it‘s usefulness. I can understand the interest in some of it‘s programming semantics. I had some of the same feelings about Objective-C upon using it in the late 90‘s, but how many jobs ask for Objective-C experience today? On the other hand, the amount of Java APIs and open source libraries that handle most of what I need to do during development of software puts Java far ahead of Ruby, Python, and other languages including C# in my opinion. But, in this case, I will continue to use Ruby on Rails to develop my web site and I don‘t think that I will mind at all.