Comments on: Mr. Fowler, back up this train!

By: Chris

Chris — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 14:04:07 +0000

I’m in the exact same situation you are in so I feel your pain. I guess we are a little father along since we are using Java 5 across the board but other than that it is the same attitude. I’ve sat in presentation here where people (who should have known better) said that Acegi (i.e. Spring Security) was for monitoring your apps and that we’d have to buy coping of Spring and Hibernate. lol While I couldn’t sell (J)Ruby I might be able to push across the idea of Groovy simply because I can ease developers who have worked here for years and thing Java is a “fad” into it.

Excellent points in your comment Maurizio!

By: Maurizio

Maurizio — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 22:18:00 +0000

Interesting article. Most of the customers I know and the company I visit are still running big chunks of their business with cobol over mainframes, some are still moving to Java 1.4 and J2EE and it’s hard to convince them about Java 1.5 (well, the only real interesting things are annotations, but only within the new JEE 5 context). They don’t even know what Ruby or Groovy are and management would laugh at me if I only would think to tell them about evaluating a new, open-source scripting language after they have been told for years to buy very expensive EJB containers (it was not me, anyway).

Enterprise are conservative about IT spending and often they are right. We have spent the last years convincing them on how cool was to move to a J2EE app server, wasting then a lot of money with the broken EJB 2.x programming model (again, it was not me). Now, we all know that would be much better to move straight to a simpler development environment, made of scripting languages, lightweight frameworks like Spring and even EJB 3.0, but most customers had their fingers burnt so it is very hard to gain their confidence again.

I have a lot of respect and admiration for Martin Fowler, but some of these languages debates are purely academic. Ruby is very interesting but its syntax is too new and exotic for most of the average programmers. Additionally, I have never seen a context were the language itself was the source of problems or the solution to them. Projects fail mainly when people do not cooperate and communicate, technology doesn’t usually matter, unless it is really broken (examples, anyone?).

+1 to Groovy, anyway.

By: Chris

Chris — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 14:56:12 +0000

LOL With things like closures and multiple return types being kicked around I think you’re right.

By: x

Sat, 08 Dec 2007 00:30:10 +0000

I think “unskilled” developers will have a better chance with Groovy than with Java 7.

By: Chris

Chris — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 23:30:38 +0000

Absolutely the argument is more general than simply Groovy vs. JRuby. The extension of the idea to IDEs, build tools, frameworks all seem to apply equally well. And you, as a single developer, certainly can do both things with your free time or your projects. I was thinking in the general sense of an organization and the need to choose a direction when developing software for it. Typically, an organization isn’t going to take a ad hoc approach to the tool sets and technologies it uses to develop its internal software.

I also find (J)Ruby much more interesting than Groovy and my intent wasn’t to compare the two languages but instead add another thought point to the discussion when having to choose between them. In my current work attempting to sell (J)Ruby would be a non-starter. Management there seriously believes Java as a whole has only been enterprise ready in the past 2-3 years. lol

Eclipse’s Groovy plug-in, while nice, currently lags behind the latest Groovy code (as I recall the plug-in is based on 1.0.1 while the current Groovy version is about to be 1.5). I have played with NetBeans and the (J)Ruby/Rails support in it is indeed outstanding.

Thanks for being the first to comment - ever.

By: Tim Goeke

Tim Goeke — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 21:31:12 +0000

Doesn’t the argument also revolve around tooling as well? If you are a IDEA shop, it looks like Groovy is the way to go, but if you’re a Netbeans shop, then maybe JRuby fits better.

I don’t know about Eclipse - it seems that the Ruby support in entirely Aptana and the Groovy support is still developing, although I have not tried it personnally.

I am mainly an Eclipse user but Netbeans has my attention at least for JRuby tinkering.

In general I feel more interested in JRuby than Groovy but I am tinkering with both. Can’t you do both things? Is the choice really Java vs Groovy vs Ruby? Why can’t you do Java + Groovy + Ruby?

Why are people threatened when others compare? Finally, can’t I fall back to a java idiom in either JRuby or Groovy? What’s the real difference?