Will Ruby on Rails kill .net and Java?

Posted at 20:07 on 29 March 2006

Ruby on Rails 1.1 has been released.

Dion Hinchcliffe has posted a blog entry at the end of which he asks the question, will it be a nail in the coffin for .net and Java?

Rails certainly looks beautiful. It is fully object oriented, with built in O/R mapping, powerful AJAX support, an elegant syntax, a proper implementation of the Model-View-Controller design pattern, and even a Ruby to Javascript converter which lets you write client side web code in Ruby.

However, I don’t think it’s the end of the line for C# and Java by a long shot. Even if it does draw a lot of fire, there is a heck of a lot of code knocking around in these languages, and there likely still will be for a very long time to come. Even throwaway code and hacked together interim solutions have a habit of living a lot longer than anyone ever expects. Look at how much code is still out there in FORTRAN, COBOL and Lisp, for instance.

Like most scripting languages such as Perl, Python, PHP and so on, Ruby is still a dynamically typed language. For this reason it will be slower than statically typed languages such as C#, C++ and Java. So it won’t be used so much in places where you need lots of raw power. However, most web applications don’t need such raw power in the business layer. The main bottleneck in web development is database access and network latency in communicating with the browser, so using C# rather than Rails would have only a very minor impact on performance. But some of them do, and in such cases the solutions often have different parts of the application written in different languages and even running on different servers. One of the solutions that we have developed, for instance, has a web front end in PHP running on a Linux box, with a back end application server running a combination of Python and C++ on a Windows server.

Rails certainly knocks the spots off PHP though…