Interview: Can Ruby become the second Java

Ruby on Rails has always been popular in China and the world. You will see stacked Ruby and Java in Java websites, search engines, and hot forums, and the two of them seem to be incompatible with each other. Even oreilly, a master who has been supporting Java for many years, began to publish Ruby books to lead people out of Java. The scope of this discussion is growing, with more and more participants, and even the father of Java gosling is involved in the debate. But the common idea is that Ruby is more efficient than Java and C # in development. This result surprised many developers. They even raised the question: is there really a better language than Java and C? However, in many discussions, the attention of Chinese people seems to be much less. Due to the historical relationship, many Chinese people do not want to discuss this issue and do not believe that Rudy will become the second Java in China. What is the development of Ruby on Rails in China? Zhuang tabwei, the technical director of Yinke network, was interviewed by the it168 reporter and answered the questions to the readers.

Ruby recognized in China

Hello! Manager Zhuang, I am a reporter from it168. As far as I know, inke net was officially launched in October 10 and changed from the original Java program to the current ror. I have several questions to ask you:

It168 reporter: Ruby is not very popular in China, and there are very few programmers in Ruby development, there are few references in China regarding Ruby's security performance, development support, performance efficiency, and cluster support. I want to know why inke net was going to use Ruby for development? Which of the following aspects are considered?

Zhuang Manager: The most taboo part of the company's technology development and selection work is follow-up. If you use any popular technology, it is no longer rational enterprise behavior. We have also carefully considered the choice of rails on Ruby.

We are a small-sized website with low access traffic. users use the services we provide mainly through a client software developed by us. Websites are just a means of assisting communication.

On the other hand, such a website must respond quickly to various user needs.

Therefore, it is a natural decision to select ror with high flexibility requirements and low load capacity/security requirements.

It168 reporter: Are there any software development companies in China that use Ruby as the mainstream development platform? I want to know what you know about Ruby's development in China?

Zhuang Manager: Rails Chinese application development status overview.

It168 reporter: What do you think is the future of Ruby in China? What are his advantages? Will he become the mainstream development platform for small and medium-sized enterprises in the future?

Zhuang Manager: Ruby and rails need to be separated. In terms of language, Ruby is very mature and advanced. Rails is very young. The current situation is that the popularity of rails drives the popularity of Ruby, which is a good thing. However, the understanding of Ruby should not only be at the level of familiarity with rails. It can be said that Ruby has taken root in China. In turn, it can also be said that only programmers can make their own contributions to Ruby's development in China, not just in pursuit of rails development efficiency.

Rails on Ruby has obvious advantages in development efficiency, but the cost advantages of development have not yet been reflected. After all, too few programmers are familiar with ror development. From this perspective, in the future, it will be difficult for small and medium-sized enterprises to adopt ror for development. To occupy more shares in small and medium-sized enterprises, the challenge is not Java, but the traditional advantage of PHP.

It168 reporter: Nowadays, many times on the Internet, it is rumored that Ruby will be dominant in Java, and some Java programmers are beginning to learn Ruby. What do you think of this phenomenon?

Zhuang Manager: Java, as the dominant language, should be challenged, especially in the Web development field. The traditional Java programming ideas are always or intentionally, or unintentionally complicate Web application development. In the rapidly changing web development field, more flexible languages and frameworks should be available for occupation and dominance. However, possible competitors should include PHP, Python, And. net, not just Ruby.

It168 reporter: Did your company's Ruby programmers switch from Java or. NET development? Why did they go to learning Ruby development?

Zhuang Manager: Our company's programmers are also Java programmers. This shift is actually quite natural. On the one hand, there is a strong contrast between the complexity of development, on the other hand, the exploration spirit of trying to learn new technologies, and the company's schedule is relatively reasonable, this will create good conditions for programmers to turn to rails on Ruby.

Ruby is surging

Since the emergence of Ruby, there has been an endless debate in the industry over Java and dynamic languages. Although there has never been a definite answer, the debate between Java and Dynamic Language has never disappeared. With the increasing complexity of Java, the advantage of Dynamic Language-simplified and easy-to-use is becoming more and more prominent. When Ruby came out, there was a rock that stirred up waves. With the emergence of Ruby, the industry began to get busy. Many websites gave a wide introduction to Ruby, ruby comments frequently appear, and Ruby news events have become a hot topic. These all make Ruby and Java more controversial, but there is still no final conclusion about who has more advantages and who can overcome them.

However, the recent several news have brought a bit of suspense to the war. The first is a piece of news on the it168 website, "Sun's acquisition of jruby is moving towards dynamic language, this article is excited for anyone who supports Ruby because Ruby can become a non-Java language supported by Sun on JVM. Sun has already paid attention to the ruby language. From a certain point of view, Ruby still has its unique advantages when it is supported by Sun.

However, in a few days, a research by the Belize media (as shown in the following table) showed very interesting results, investigating which language is used in Ajax development. The results show that the Java language ranks first with more than half (50.5%) of the usage, and it is surprising that Ruby occupies the lowest usage rate of only 10.4%, the usage is even lower than that of C and C ++. See the original article: "Ruby's future is slim". Some people have begun to doubt ruby more or less. On the one hand, they are highly appraised and affirmed on the characteristics of Ruby. On the other hand, ruby's usage is so low that there is a clear contrast between the two aspects. Indeed, it is good to say that a technology is good, and no one is using it. How can it be said that it has not been verified by the market!

However, I believe that it is of little significance to discuss Ruby and Java who have more advantages. First of all, Java has its own advantages, and Java will continue to be at its peak, and maintain a good performance in enterprise applications, which is beyond doubt and proved by the market. In addition, Ruby is highly capable of text processing, which is different from Perl. At the same time, Ruby's syntax is simple, and Exception Handling and iterator structures make programming simple and clear. This is exactly the next-generation programming language we are looking forward to, that is, the language is simple. From the perspective of a certain language, we can't see anything, but if we stand at a higher position and look at the problem comprehensively from different perspectives, we can hardly find that, the two will try to stay the same, and use their own expertise, so that we can build more powerful applications.

While sun acquired jruby, Charles nutter, one of the core developers of jruby, and heart developer Thomas enobo also joined sun. This seems to allow us to associate Ruby with Java. If Sun can make enough investment on JVM, it will better support dynamic languages and embrace new things. Relying on Sun's powerful strength and unique advantages, Ruby will certainly have a huge market. At the same time, Ruby also needs a transitional period, which has been verified in the market, let more people use it. But for now, Ruby is surging and ready to go!

 

Can dark horse Ruby challenge Java?

From the interview above, we can easily see that Ruby is gaining recognition from China and the world. Who can say that Ruby will not become the second Java! Compared with the advantages of Java, sun is not as powerful a competitor of Microsoft as we thought in the past due to its mistakes in decision-making, on the contrary, a humble Ruby has recently appeared frequently in our field of vision. Some people have compared it to an absolute dark horse in new recruits.

There may be many Java fans who want to discuss this, but this debate is really in front of us, and this debate will continue, with the increasing complexity of Java, the advantage of Dynamic Language-simplicity and ease of use is becoming more and more prominent. If Java is a solid freight train, Ruby on Rails is a fashionable express train.

David Heinemeier Hansson, founder of Ruby on Rails, believes that Ruby and other dynamic languages are the biggest threat to Java on the web.

"Ruby on Rails shows that the dynamic language you use is easier to maintain than Java. In the past, we thought that only Java has the market influence, and now it is the turn of rails to become popular ."

Geir Magnusson, a member of the Apache Software Foundation and an engineer of Intel's middleware Products Division, once asked the audience how many people tried Ruby on Rails. More than half of them raised their hands. However, when asked how many people adopt the product framework, almost all people put their hands down.

This small survey shows that enterprise-level Java developers are not yet ready to switch from Java to Ruby on Rails development. However, Heinemeier Hansson said, "I have seen many Java developers escape upstream, instead, they give in to low end-another kind of understanding that most people need most of the time-they express a strong desire for a static language that is really needed."

In fact, Java developers do not have to think that Java has come to an end, and the end of Java is approaching. Every language is being discussed. According to my findings on the internet, most netizens believe that Ruby is not as powerful as Java. It only limits the scripting language on web pages, and sun is not indifferent to various challenges, java is facing the challenge by improving and expanding the virtual machine technology. In terms of technology, Java is still the best in the world, and many third-party controls are supported. This is incomparable to Ruby, in the web development field, Java is indeed challenged by ruby. Some developers cannot tolerate learning Servlets, spring, XML, hibernate, struts then needs to learn about some of the adhesive frameworks that will soon emerge and turn to Ruby. Recently, some small and medium enterprises in China have begun to get involved in ruby, the inke network we interviewed today is a good proof, but it will not happen as the ruby enthusiast predicted. A large number of Java immigrants occur, and they can only coexist with each other. So I firmly believe that Java will not leave us. In large-scale engineering development, we chose Java as the new architecture, instead of Ruby or Python, it is because it is a mature ecosystem with free and commercial tools and APIs. When using Ruby or Python for programming, there is some speed improvement, but with the modern Java ide like intellij, eclipse and netbeans, You can go faster in Java.

However, it is quite comfortable to use Ruby for programming. There is still a long way to go for Ruby to challenge java. The use of ROR in third-party support is a little weak, and whether it can stand the test, it also looks at future development trends.

How does the father of Java evaluate other languages?

We would also like to hear how sun reacts to the rumors. The father of Java explained the online debate at the last discussion at Sun's international conference on education and research.

Reporter: There are many different languages in the world. Some people say that the emergence of some new languages poses a threat to Java. What do you think?

James Gosling: No, I don't think so. Most recent scripting languages, such as PHP and Ruby, are perfect systems. They are powerful because they have undergone special processing, so all the languages that these people talk about today are just used to generate Web pages. So you just want to generate a webpage and they will do well. But in the application field, don't expect them to do more, because they all have serious performance problems. In all these dynamic languages, if you try to use them to write things that have strict execution requirements, they will all be terrible failures. If you write a statement A = B + C, Java may be the same as PHP in terms of performance differences. What they really do is that they all focus on one field and they make programming in that field easier. What we have been doing is to get more simplification out of the tool, and we have done a lot of work to reach a balance between simplicity and functionality. They are mutually dependent and mutually exclusive. Building a system with powerful functions requires a bit of complexity. It is in this way that the world is connected with each other and helps your running system to have a continuation framework. With PHP, you can do a good job in the WEB presentation layer. You should not use PHP to write a class library for interstellar navigation. This cannot be done.

Microsoft C # is also related to it #. It is difficult to criticize C # horizontally because they copy the Java specification. That is the time when we worry that they will make something innovative, but they do not. They have no choice to learn from it. Obviously, they only focus on a development platform.

We try to work with all these languages. We know that many people are talking about how Java is compared with X or how Java is compared with Y. We are working hard to ensure that Java is combined with PHP or Java and python. In this way, you can use php for the web presentation layer. Many people use PHP as the WEB presentation layer and Java for analysis, Because Java is really good at high-quality analysis.