It appears that a couple of my so-called friends are expressing surprise(?) or condemnation(?) over the fact that I didn't fall under the spell of Ruby-on-Rails at the $NFJS Austin show. As the great comic Steve Martin used to say, "Well excuuuuuuuse me!"

Dion first takes a couple of cheap shots:

Firstly, you can't say much for Ted wrt taste... I mean he is running that .NET blog software now ;)

Secondly, I think Ted hit the nail on the head and didn't even realise it ... I think the Java world took this [greater need for configuration] waaaay to far. Abstractions upon abstractions. We forgot that web frameworks ARE FOR THE WEB!!!

Before you look around we have JavaServer Faces, which "features" that you don't just get to write out HTML. Sounds great on paper. I still hear people talking about how they will be able to just flip on a different Renderer and they will have a mobile application. Of course, in reality a mobile application is very different. You care about different things.

I want a web framework that lets me work with web technology (HTML is one of them ;), but gives me a nice clean way to do this.

In my experience, I like to have simple tools which just work, but if the hardest part of your application is the web framework, you are lucky!

We then turn to Justin's comments:

Ted Neward, a great friend, colleague, and all around smart-guy, just really missed the boat on Rails this last weekend. Dion pretty much hit the nail on the head on the technical response. Rails is a web framework that doesn’t make me think I’m writing a Swing app, or that I’m writing an EJB app. It pretends to be nothing; it is, rather, a powerful framework for writing an app that delivers HTML over HTTP. Hell, what with the ASP.NET/JSF render kit wunderland, I’m starting to wonder if we need a new acronym: POWA (Plain Ol’ Web App).

Regardless, he also whiffed (sorry big guy) in his musings about managed versions. There is, of course, Trails, a mighty attempt to make the Spring/Hibernate/Etc. stack as easy to configure and use as Rails, and MonoRail, an open source .NET equivalent as well. What fascinates me about MonoRail is that it is one of the first attempts to move away from the standard ASP.NET design pattern; the MVC crowd has just not found a great way to own that space. Maybe MonoRail will be the ticket. (By the way, check out the other stuff going on at CastleProject; DynamicProxy is a great little tool for making synthesized proxies a la Java, without all that Reflection.Emit() hassle.)

When I say he whiffed, it isn’t because he couldn’t tick off the various projects off the top of his head. Its because he missed that Rails is already influencing everybody else. The “small” feature he mentions, convention over configuration, is catching on like wildfire, and I don’t think it would have unless Rails had highlighted the fact that the 80% case is to only configure 10% of your app. We’re also seeing some folks revise their commitment to web components; with Rails, parameterized partial templates give you most of what you get with web components, and at a fraction of the compexity.

Look, guys, at the end of the day, if Rails is about Ruby and the things that a scripting language can do that a compiled, statically-typed language can't, then Rails definitely has a place in the world and I'll take the time to learn it. If Rails is about bringing sanity back to the web framework space, then I'll wait for the Java and .NET Rails-influenced projects to ship and stick with something that has BOTH the sanity AND the support of managed platforms.

So Dion, Justin, if you still think I whiffed, tell me why, pray tell. Or else admit that you're just jumping on a "bright shiny new toy" bandwagon and that two years from now, Rails won't be in anybody's lexicon. In other words, it's "put up or shut up" time.

So I'm in the Austin area this weekend, for yet another NFJS show, except this time I actually had time in the schedule to attend the Friday night talks. (Normally I'm too busy traveling to be here on Friday--I typically need the Friday night timeframe to actually get here, which probably explains why my Saturday morning talks are always a crap shoot.)

Part of my reason for wanting to be here early was a desire to see more of Dave Thomas' talks, and in particular, I wanted to get more of the Ruby and Rails Religion that seems to be infesting... er, maybe I should say "spreading like wildfire" instead... my friends in the speaker crowd. I mean, normally they're a pretty sane and sensible bunch, and if these guys are all drinking deeply of the Ruby and Rails Kool-Ade, I want to take a hit from the bong as well and see if it's a good trip, or just a trip.

So I sat through Dave's Rails presentation, and as he was finishing up, I felt strangely disappointed--not so much that Rails isn't a cool little framework, but that there really wasn't anything more there. I mean, I see a bunch of intelligent code-generation and some common-sense defaults, but other than that it's strangely reminiscent of the servlet scene circa 1997--even to the point where Rails will reload modified scripts on-the-fly for you. Hell, if the servlet containers had been smart enough (or crazy enough, depending on your viewpoint) to do the servlet compilation for you on the fly (memory leaks in javac notwithstanding), it would be very much like what we have right now with Rails.

And yet, we didn't stay there in the servlet community once we had that kind of functionality. We found a greater need for configuration, more flexible and powerful execution models, and so on. In essence, as web apps got more complicated, the servlet/JSP space got more complex to match it. "With power, comes complexity; with complexity, comes power." I wonder if Rails will eventually find that same need, or is it always going to target the easiest/easier x% of webapps and leave the harder stuff alone?

In the meantime, am I missing something from Rails? Is there any movement afoot to create a JavaRails ("Jails"? Ew.) project that I'm not aware of? (Come to think of it, in the .NET space too, while we're at it? "Nails", anybody? )

With this entry, I inaugurate a new weblog, this one devoted to technical issues of all walks and shapes, including but not limited to Java, .NET, C/C++, and Web services, but with a smattering of Ruby, Python, SQL, and just about anything else that happens to cross my path.

Some may wonder why the separation, considering I already had a weblog that a lot of people were subscribed to. The reasons are pretty simple, when you look at it:

1. A vocal, anonymous collection(?) of people complained about the fact that I was talking about .NET issues and people, yet the blog was subscribed to JavaBlogs. While I find it a short-sighted view, I realized that I really should have category support so as to be able to allow readers to "screen out" the postings they didn't want, which brings me to my next reason.
2. I'm really tired of my own weblog engine. To put it bluntly, I never really wanted to be in the business of being a blogging provider, yet writing my own engine sort of put me into that space, and I found that, like the proverbial shoemaker's children, I wasn't really spending any energy on bringing it up to speed in feature terms, and, more importantly, I didn't really want to, either. I like writing prose and writing code, but blogging to me was an infrastructure I wanted "to just work", not something I wanted to tinker with. So I decided that I wanted to switch engines.
3. I've also found myself periodically hestitating from posting something super-personal (such as a spin on politics or history) because so many had subscribed to my blog for its technical content. Since blogs are supposed to be a personal channel, yet since my blog was clearly also serving as a professional/technical channel, it seemed prudent to split my blogging into a professional channel (here), and a personal one (there). (Actually, I'm going to eventually migrate those entries over to this blog, set up redirects, and do all of my personal blogging from the family blog instead.)
4. The blogging engine had served its original intended purpose--to see if Servlet filters could stand in as Controllers instead of servlets in an MVC scenario--and it was time to close the experiment down and let somebody else handle blogging engine featuritis.

In this case, the engine is dasBlog, which has some righteous features that I already love and some of the best technical support in the world. What's more, I'm hoping that the mail-to-weblog and/or the w.Bloggar or Blogjet support will help me blog more often, since I've often found myself on an airplane without an Internet connection and wanting to blog something. In particular, some of the topics I want to blog on in the coming months:

• The Vietnam of Computer Science
• Distributed objects and why "good distributed object model" is a contradiction-in-terms
• Why the term "Web services" should be deprecated in favor of "XML Services" instead
• Weighing in on the duck typing vs. strong typing debate

And a few more, besides. As always, I'm reachable via email, and so long as the comment spam doesn't get too bad, via comments here. Thanks for listening, and here's to many more years of interesting blogging commentary.