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Comment by aymeric | Hacker News Reader

I have learned Ruby on Rails and I am amazed that after three weeks with RoR I am more productive than after 10 years with .net

I reported my own experience moving from Asp.net to Ruby on Rails in my blog a few days ago:

"How an experienced developer multiplied his productivity tenfold" http://aymeric.gaurat.net/index.php/2010/how-an-experienced-...

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It has been a while since I've been a newbie at Ruby/Rails, but back when I was a newbie, I was routinely shocked at how stupidly easy it was to do the same things I had been doing in Java... in a fraction of the time. You also get access to "the new hotness" a few years earlier than Enterprise Java does -- I was being warned off Memcached in Java by the MySQL guys at Sun ("Don't tell the bosses, but the Java client is not ready for prime time") literally two years after I had it in production at BCC.

Did you happen to try out other frameworks before deciding on RoR? I'm thinking about testing the waters outside of MS land and I'd like to know why you chose RoR versus, say, Django or even Struts.

I find it hard to imagine that there is any web framework still around that could be more screwed up than Struts. After having had some major exposure to the various members of the Struts family and Rails, I would say that the experience of using Struts 2 is slightly worse than using Rails while being flogged by an expert torturer. :-)

If you want to test the world beyond MS I would recommend (apart from Rails or Django) looking into the Scala/Lift (my preferred toolset), Clojure/Compojure or JavaScript/Node.js combos (depending upon you language preferences).

I would be careful with Rails, when you plan to do some heavy data processing and/or if you need your application processes to run for a long time without being restarted.

For small, straightforward applications or prototyping the Ruby/Sinatra/MongoDB combo is also really really nice.

I would be careful with Rails, when you plan to do some heavy data processing and/or if you need your application processes to run for a long time without being restarted.

Heavy data processing yes, but the long running process is bogus. The major memory leaks in Rails were patched up years ago. The tooling is a lot better today on the off chance that you do need to debug a memory leak, and the new breed of ruby runtimes such as Rubinius will keep memory in even tighter control.

Being somewhat problematic for long running process is not only a function of memory leaks.

Even with the better runtimes now available, suggesting that they come close to the stability (and performance and long term memory consumption and profiling + debugging capabilities) you'll find on the big JVMs is not really helpful (JRuby being the obvious exception but even here I am sceptic).

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