Sun changed their stock symbol to JAVA for a reason
I only just caught up with Rick Hightower’s great post on why Sun should ditch JRuby and support Groovy.
For all of us in the Groovy camp it’s a no-brainer. We love the dynamic nature and productivity of Groovy, we’re still a stone’s throw from our good friend Java, and we’ve got the hottest new web framework on the block in Grails. And on the JRuby side you’ve got a work in progress port of a language far from Java in its nature, that not only has to deal with its own implementation challenges but also with the issues inherent in Rails which is surely the primary reason for having JRuby.
Nobody wants to code Ruby in a Java VM do they? They just want the RAD gains of Rails. It’s obvious to me – JRuby would not exist at Sun if two years ago a Rails-like framework was possible with plain old Java.
Do we need to remind Sun why they changed their stock symbol to JAVA? Java is nigh-on de facto in enterprise / web services. Rails has barely made a dent here, for good reason.
Grails 1.0 is just around the corner, Groovy 1.5 is out. There is a commercial business behind both now. It’s high time Sun woke up and smelled the groovy coffee! Here’s a slide from my Grails Exchange 2007 talk which I think illustrates where I’m going. (courtesy of the excellent iStockPhoto.com)
9 Comments
Matt Hughes
January 31, 2008I understand your point and have thought the same thing a while ago.
The problem with your logic though is that Sun uses logic to make decisions, or at the very least, logic that is understandable to most outsiders. Most tech companies get behind a technology and give it their full backing while wishing ill on any competitors.
Sun however sees a diverse, vibrant tech ecosystem as beneficial to them and will do much to encourage that. Look at their recent buy of MySQL. By traditional thinking, Sun needs another open source database provider like they need a hole in the head. They endorse Postgres already by providing support contracts. And they also endorse Apache Derby by bundling it with the JDK.
So the rational thing to do from Sun’s perspective would not be to dump JRuby but to add more support for Groovy and Grails. At present the only thing I see them doing is encouraging dynamic languages on the JVM and providing generic support for that. So yes I also think they should suppot Groovy more, but remember that the JVM is much more important to them than Java the language.
Raphaël Valyi
January 31, 2008No, actually I think Rails is not the only motivation for a lot of people. Ruby itself is perhaps the smarter dynamic language you can think about. Having it on the JVM is just so great. People start using it even for Swing dev. Actually any high level application requiring some scripting might use it. and would hardly think about an other scripting language (Goovy is more for Java developers only, not end users).The syntax of Ruby is so flexible that you can almost implement any Domain Specif Language in (J)Ruby. The Groovy one is a little less fexible. In some cases it would make the difference (imagine you want some matlab language for instance). Also, despite it’s active Development, JRuby is already faster than Groovy. Groovy has no JIT compiler, has it? So this is or will soon be a non issue.
And finally yes, it’s hard to find a better web framework than Rails. Yes we could improve it (on concurrency, performance), but starting with the Rails base and community seems just smarter than starting yet an other bloated framework. Grails is not that bad. The Hibernate persistence is even good actually and lots of folks are starting using Hibernate instead of ActiveRecord in their JRuby on Rails app when they need the data mapper pattern; it’s just that Grails starts with almost no community compared to Rails. Regards,
Raphaël Valyi.
Marc Palmer
January 31, 2008Raphael – Grails has no community?
http://www.nabble.com/Web-Development-Framework-f16257.html
We have more mailing list activity than Rails for a start. Oh, and we may well have the whole Java community soon
Grails is “yet another bloated framework”?!
As for people coding Ruby on the VM… how many of these people have actually tried Groovy? The differences in metaprogramming that you cite are small even by your admission, so much as to be negligible i.e. first we take the subset of people who want to do dynamic programming on the Java VM, then we take from that only the people who want to write DSLs and then from that we take only the ones who need niche “Matlab-style” DSLs. Those 2 guys are welcome to JRuby
Marc Palmer
January 31, 2008Matt H: Mysql purchase is huge. This is the most prevalent database in websites and webapps. Sun owns it now. Sun now has a finger in every LAMP website on the net now. Postgres/Derby don’t deliver anything like that do they? It just doesn’t compare. Mysql is a key technology, and a wise purchase.
JRuby is not. I have a very strong feeling that three years from now we will be saying “Do you remember when Sun bought into JRuby and thought it would take off as a platform?”. There’s also such thing as ROI. Where is it for Sun with JRuby? They may invest in Groovy and Grails in addition to JRuby if they are smart, but if the ROI on either is poor, they will surely ditch it eventually.
Otherwsie you might as well say they should invest in everything that moves.
Raphaël Valyi
January 31, 2008Marc,
about the ROI:
well it costs almost nothing for Sun to support JRuby actually. They are paying less than 3 guys full time on it. The thing is that some of those guys are incredibly talented, that’s why it’s progressing so quickly. So I’m not too afraid about the ROI for Sun. And come on, JRuby guys are also talking with JVM guys like John Rose, so they are actually helping Sun to improve the dynamic language support in general on the JVM. That’s already a good ROI.
About Grails being bloated. I dont’ think Rails is totally bloated. Hibernate might even been justified in some situation where ActiveRecord wouldn’t fit as I said. Still was is totally bloated in J2EE so far are the MCV frameworks, the IOC frameworks (while Spring is nice for a Java thing), the BPM frameworks… That’s already a lot. Grails makes it way better than standard J2EE web dev, but IMHO it’s still far from what you get on the MVC part with Rails. Take the REST (including nested and multi-format resources) of Rails. I can’t see anything so clever in Grails, sorry (or may be you could give me some pointer?).
About the Grails community:
Ok, I’m actually impressed so many folks are on your Grails mailing list. Still, on a daily basis, I can find more that 70 people on the #jruby irc vs less than 10 for #groovy. Also, while I’ve no clue, I believe Rails folks are sharing a LOT through the code snippets they publish in their blogs. That’s the first web dev framework ever I see people sharing effective solutions in just 5 lines of code or a bit more. Grails could may be follow this in some way but I simply don’t see it.
So finally, cool for you you’ve chosen Grails, but I see no point in asking Sun to drop JRuby. I mean that doesn’t cost Sun anything, bring a lot to web dev and will just help prove something I believe. I’m not sure it’s true, but I’m even getting the feeling some tool vendors are doing a lot for people to stick with J2EE or Grails, because they fear people start using Rails and don’t require their tools anymore. I never coded with Vim before Rails. I find Netbeans Ruby support great, but I still use Vim on a regular basis as Rails is so simple to get working.
Peace.
hohonuuli
February 1, 2008I think Sun has gotten a huge ROI from the JRuby guys. Besides doing an incredible job getting JRuby out the door (with great tooling support in Netbeans), the JRuby guys talk to the Groovy, Jython (etc.) folks. I think the cross-pollination of ideas from very enthusiastic and talented developers is improving the state of all dynamic languages on the JVM.
Rick Hightower
February 2, 2008Thanks for the kind words.
–Cheers
Marc Palmer
February 4, 2008ROI – where are the successful JRuby deployment stories? I haven’t heard of any yet, but maybe that’s just because I’m not “plugged into” that world?
Sun continuing to support JRuby affects the perception of Sun and Sun’s apparent position on dynamic languages. Supporting JRuby and not Groovy tells people in the enterprise that for some reason, Sun think JRuby is a better bet than Groovy – something that is rather contentious given that Ruby/Rails is barely making a dent in the enterprise sector by all accounts.
It sends out the wrong message.
Marc Palmer
February 4, 2008Raphaël – Hibernate is a serious ORM, ActiveRecord is “niche” in enterprise terms.
IRC – the groovy/grails dev teams choose mainly to support by mail, because we find this more accessible to us and presents a better, more archive-friendly way to communicate.
I don’t recall a single technology’s success being measured by how many people chat about it on IRC.
Do you want use to work out how many people use IMs to chat to each other about Grails too? It’s laughable!