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Earlier quoted context omitted.
"... Java, have you learned to easy yet?" Try Play, Grails, Vert.X. And you know what it isn't easy. Having to deal with Ruby's dependency nightmares.
Dependency management in ruby is trivial with bundler.
But if you have large apps with multiple Ruby versions then dealing with rvmrc, bundler and gem incompatibilities is a nightmare.
Java's forward compatibility is a lot more robust.
http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/ruby/
But there was a stretch from around 2005 to maybe 2008 where Rails seemed to defy criticism. It grew and grew, despite the criticism. I tried it for a project in 2006 and I became a fan. The easy use of 3rd party code, via gems, was much easier than anything I had known in Java or PHP.
I do not know a way to say when some of the criticism began to stick, but clearly things have changed. I have my own personal experience: once a fan of Ruby and now a fan of Clojure. And others have moved on -- there was recently the conversation about multi-threaded Ruby apps, and it seemed to me all the smart people agreed that jRuby is the future of Ruby: http://tonyarcieri.com/2012-the-year-rubyists-learned-to-sto...
If I had to pick one moment when some of the criticism against Rails began to take hold, even among those who had once favored Rails, it was Zed Shaw's insane rant:
http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/ruby/rails/is-a-ghetto
Even though the tone is insane, he made some points that stuck in people's heads, including mine. This was important to note:
"I believe, if I could point at one thing it’s the following statement on 2007-01-20 to me by David H. creator of Rails:
(15:11:12) DHH: before fastthread we had ~400 restarts/day
(15:11:22) DHH: now we have perhaps 10
(15:11:29) Zed S.: oh nice
(15:11:33) Zed S.: and that's still fastcgi right?
Notice how it took me a few seconds to reply. This one single statement basically means that we all got duped. The main Rails application that DHH created required restarting ~400 times/day. That’s a production application that can’t stay up for more than 4 minutes on average."
And even now, in 2013, when I have to set up a new server with Rails, even with Nginx and Unicorn and all the other systems to help me, I find Rails annoying to set up, especially compared to the simplicity of PHP running on Apache or a Clojure app bundled up with something like "lein uberjar".
To answer the question...Yes, Java has changed for the better. Give it a go...you'll be impressed.
I was impressed, for real.
In the year 2013 it is difficult to remember why Rails was such an explosive breath of fresh air, back when it burst onto the mainstage in 2004/2005. The essay that I think best captured the switch in popularity, from Java (and EJBs and Struts, etc) to Rails, was "The departure of the hyper-enthusiasts" by Bruce Eckel, written in December of 2005. He wrote: "One of the basic tenets of the Python language has been tha…
Rails might have deteriorated in ease of use, but I cannot imagine it being worse than Java EE was in 2004. Modern Java EE is a world of pain, even simple apps are difficult to build. The entire front end stack is antisocial, difficult to extend and anachronistic.
I don't think anyone working with a modern java web stack could read this post about rails 'being like java' without a dark chuckle.
To answer the question...Yes, Java has changed for the better. Give it a go...you'll be impressed.
Changed so much that version 7 does not support 32-bit applications anymore. I was impressed, for real.
http://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/webnotes/install/index....
"... Java, have you learned to easy yet?" No, it hasn't. That's why we're using Rails. And to be honest, it ain't that bad.
"... Java, have you learned to easy yet?" Try Play, Grails, Vert.X. And you know what it isn't easy. Having to deal with Ruby's dependency nightmares.
No, Rails hasn't turned into Java. Rails has matured into a complex ecosystem. Java has also matured into a complex ecosystem. Frameworks upon frameworks is a recipe for complexity, potential performance problems, bottlenecks, and environmental/context-specific issues regardless of the language that you're using. Will there ever be a language or simple framework that is popular, solves all problems, and doesn't get m…
I know this makes me sound old. I own that.