More Bubble

Michael Coté:

It seems to me that people building LAMP, Ruby, django, or other applications think of themselves more as building web applications with whatever technology tools they need to use: web services, cron jobs, MySQL, ruby, PHP, python, maybe some Java: whatever. What matters is getting the web application working.

People who using Java see themselves primarily as building Java applications that happen to have a “view” (as we OO head-jobs would call it) that’s the web.

I can't really quote just a part of the article and do it any justice; read the whole thing. Anyway, this is one aspect of what I refer to as The Java Bubble.

Dear Michael, I'm a developer for 15 years, 10 as a professional, and in the last 7 working with Java. Java was to me like a "revelation". We have objects! We have classes! It's cool. But with the years, and I think it's because it that came from an enterprise it became a bloated platform: " - If you need it right it has to be done in Java, Java EE, whatever J". The big problem is that management and higher levels feel safe, maybe just because Sun is behind. Despite my personal projects now are all using Ruby, MySQL, Mongrel, It's hard to convince management that it's a good thing for the enterprise also. They can't see, for instance, the joy (and the cost!) of sitting on a meeting to gather requirements with a laptop and at end have a running prototype, approved by the client. I got myself out of the bubble, hoping others will also do. Regards, Marcos

Posted by Marcos on 2007-08-02

cant speak for django, but Rails devs definitely write for rails, not for the web - incidentally rails handles the web part for them - but its smack in the category of working around it - Markaby to generage HTML, RJS to generate javascript, ARec to generate SQL, ARsrc to map uris.. maybe once Ruby runs in the browser they can start erasing all the generation/abstraction stuff and stop 'working around' everything.. compare this to something like camping, or any ultra tiny framework that expects you to write CSS in CSS, HTML in HTML, JS in JS..

Posted by cr on 2007-08-04

"Markaby to generage HTML, RJS to generate javascript," Clearly you haven't built a project in Rails. Rails is nothing but a web app and if you are using Markaby to generate HTML you're missing out. One of the beautiful things about Rails is how well it separates the view from the logic. Keep your HTML in the view so your designers can make it pretty without having to sort through code they don't understand.

Posted by Tony Spencer on 2007-08-05