Ruby or Groovy ?
There are a lot of things to consider when choosing a new language or approach to application development. One thing to consider is just how productive you could be when compared to an existing approach or language.
The potential productivity gains from learning groovy are being discovered and compared to other approaches in this interesting blog.
For those who don’t want to click through, it appears Groovy / Grails is more productive than Ruby / Ruby On Rails. I’m sure this is subjective and I’m happy to hear from those who have done both. I have done both but I haven’t done enough to comment.
One thing I am hearing a lot is a new Ruby mantra, “It’s so fast to develop but it runs slow and I’m spending a lot of time performance tuning.”
I’m still keen on the groovy approach, as you may have guessed.
Hopefully one day everything will be as fast as Lint !
August 3rd, 2007 at 9:45 am
I think the interesting thing is how they also include comments about a grails/java hybrid. Because that is what I think is a more real world application.
I have found that most web apps, will have anywhere between 50%-80% of the time spent on the CRUD aspects of the application. As developers, I think that it is insane that we are doing this over and over again with each new application. For me, Grails makes this trivial (which is Rails offering too). But being based on Groovy and Java, you then have the luxury to decide how you will build the things that matter - such as the business logic and workflow. And if you need it to be performat, you can do that in Java (I too have heard about Rails performance problems).
I haven’t had much experience with Rails, but have developed 2-3 apps in Grails. And have become familiar enough that the last application I did was a prototype. It had about a dozen domain classes, and I implemented Compass/Lucene search, tagging and a custom UI - It took me one afternoon to get that done. I even impressed myself!!!