10 May 2007 JavaOne – Ruby on Rails Vs. JSF and jMaki
Day two at JavaOne and I’ve been amazed at how many times presenters (including many Sun employees) have advocated Ruby on Rails during their presentations, be it running on JRuby or the native C Ruby implementation.
The thing that I’m curious about is if and how this support fits in with JSF and jMaki. Are Sun intending that JRuby on Rails be a lightweight alternative for building small apps, whilst JSF and JMaki are for the big boys? Or are they just going to sit back and see what happens? I think it’s a good idea that they’ve embraced JRuby, but their support is certainly low-key compared to what they’ve done for JSF in the past. It’s almost like they’re hedging in case JSF and jMaki fail.
Not that this is a bad thing. It’s not like JSF has taken off. I’ve always been interested in what it was theoretically capable of, but frankly it wasn’t until ‘JSF in Action‘ came out that I was actually able to understand it. The same can be said of jMaki: in theory it’s seemed like a promising integration of JSF and Ajax. But when Mark attended an introductory session on jMaki today he came away disappointed. For at this point in time, when it comes to building a rich Ajax interface, jMaki comes up short compared to RJS templates or GWT.
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