Go Beyond JSP with Dynamically Typed Languages

While supported by a huge vendor community, copious documentation, and an incredibly rich set of libraries, Java is groaning under it's own weight. java is great at enterprise transactions, but it's getting very hard to do anything quick and easy with java, as there is a lot of infrastructure to build, and the language itself forces the programmer to write extra code to jump through hoops.

For instance I was playing with a program to tally the count of login shells by type for all users in /etc/password. It takes 10 lines of lisp, and 12 lines of perl. I did it in java just out of curiosity and it took 34 lines. A lot of that is packing primitive values for storage in a collection, and unpacking them upon retrieval from a collection. and so it goes...

While java is a great language, you as a programmer don't realize just how much extra work you're doing, until you try something like ruby, which has a wonderful syntax, concise yet expressive, and is just plain fun to program in.

Ruby on rails may is getting a lot of buzz in the web development community, and might just help ruby to be the next big thing...

I found this presentation to be quite interesting. It compares Java Servlets, JSP, Python/TurboGears, Ruby on Rails, Python/Zope with Plone, and Django.

It's a 378MB download, so I'll give you the big news up front. Java really comes out bad compared to everything else. And I mean *REALLY* bad.

The presentation is at least several months old. TurboGears and Rails have advanced quite a bit since it was made. Not sure about the others. Java, so far as I know, hasn't.

http://oodt.jpl.nasa.gov/better-web-app.mov