I was waiting for this moment and now it is arrived. Java people, those involved in some way in the biggest java web application frameworks (Struts, Tapestry, Hibernate) have finally got an opinion about RoR.

Read this Hibernate vs. Rails by Patrick Peak. This is a quite deep investigation, involving some true code comparison “How I did that in Java” compared with “How I did that in Rails”. The conclusion are quite interesting: Hibernate shines with the growing of the application complexity, while RoR could be the very best choice in “little” application but its way to handle complex schemas doesn’t scale very well.

Bruce Tate begins talking about a toy , but conclusion are barely the same and can be summarized with this quote:

Rails may be productive out of the gate. But it’s sure to wither under the load of enterprise development. After all, Rails has a few obvious flaws: domain objects must inherit from a common persistent base class, the templating technology does look a whole like the embedded Java that failed for this community, and Ruby is probably not as fast as Java.

After writing this blog entry just to take a look at RoR, David Geary is curiously getting more and more involved in RoR, being now the co-author of a book about RoR! We should look further to his entries!

My personal conclusion, after these readings, is that those people are just a little, well, embarassed. They (obviously) were not impressed by yet another framework when RoR went out. They have Java and those impressive tools to make enterpise wide BIG APPLICATION. So, who cares? But after looking at RoR, is seems that they realize that probably a new star is born.