The Java community is spending an amazing amount of money and brainpower on making Java more dynamic. Dependency injection and aspect-oriented programming are groundbreaking ideas for Java, and they are only now getting serious commercial traction. For Java developers, these ideas represent better transparency and simpler application development.
Collapsing Under the Weight of Abstraction?
My playtime in Ruby makes another, more powerful idea, clearer. As we stretch Java in increasingly unnatural directions, there's a cost. AOP and dependency injection are near-trivial exercises in Ruby, but they force Java developers to learn new programming models, deal with XML, and introduce increasingly complex syntax. With each new metaprogramming concept that we bake into Java, it's looking more and more like all of that complexity is trying to drive us somewhere. The net effect is to push Java further and further into the enterprise niche, and make it less and less accessible to the average Joe. Contrast that situation with Ruby, where dependency injection and AOP don't consume your focus; you're free to apply those ideas in spots right where you need them.
I do think that Ruby, with Rails, is a near-ideal solution for that sweet spot that we've pushed: a web-based frontend for a relational database. I've already said that I'm using Ruby in a commercial application. My customer demanded productivity and a price point that I couldn't achieve in any other way. I also still recommend Java to many of my clients. They need complex frameworks that Ruby does not yet support, or they depend on a core set of developers that have already been trained, or they have so much legacy code in Java that change would be impractical.
In the next chapter, I'll make these arguments real. I'll show you how to build a web-based application, from scratch, to access a relational database with a web application. Then, I'll show you what another killer app might be, for another language.
