How would you say RIFE compares to Tapestry. I was thinking about going something like Tapestry, hivemind, and hibernate. Would RIFE basically be a substitute for all three of these?

Also, I love that you built that stupid tada app and released it as open-source. Have you considered doing the same with Basecamp and how long do you think it would take?

One day you might even convince yourself. But for now, you're soundly beaten. You made a longer app, which does less, does not have the performance features, and has a user interface dredged up from the year 2000.

Less power, more code. Hrrm.

That flash interface was a clever touch. By using it you managed to hide the horrific mess which would be your HTML generation. Instead, you made a minimal output and let a flash app (which you don't have to codecount, even though you have to maintain it) handle it for you.

Where I come from, that's called punting, and it means you've given the other team the ball.

Why not make Basecamp next! Let's see how much you can mess up that application next!

I wasn't aware that your choice of programming language validated your poor user interface design. RIFE or no, you've got some serious problems in there. Like, how moving items doesn't nudge the scrollbar? Or how I can't copy-paste into those fields in Firefox? Or how I can't change the font sizes to suit my preference?

But, you're using RIFE, so it doesn't matter, right?

I was also unaware that caching shared lists was bad too. You're going to let Tadalist outperform you on serving shared lists and shared list RSS?

That's very bad of you, Geert. You're letting your tribe down.

You can't claim the high road here, as you started in you "oh, here's a bug… this framework is obviously inferior" post.

The real difference is if you prefer to develop in ruby, or you prefer to develop in java. Relax, guys, their relative merits all depend on what's important to you.

Please, Geert, come up with your own useful applications, and leave the bile to the folks on Javablogs. Competition, not flame wars, is what makes the good stuff happen.

I completely concur in my blog post.

Personally, I like a lot of what I see about Rails and Ruby, and I've never been able to get my head around Java (it's always struck me as very unnecessarily verbose). But frankly, I can understand why DHH's particular style of enthusiasm can get under one's skin, particularly when it gets amplified through the echo chamber by rabid fans. As a Mac user, I dealt with the incessant rah-rah-rah about DHH's text editor, TextMate. A lot of the "cheerleading" was actually beating up on the market leader, BBEdit; a lot of the beating was, well, we'll say "not entirely informed."

I don't particularly see why the world can't have RIFE and Rails and Perl's Maypole and what have you. Each have their own strengths and weaknesses, and ultimately the biggest strength and/or weakness in each one is the language itself. You use what you're comfortable with and what you have an investment in. Rails' success will not mean that every company using Java internally will suddenly switch; proving that you can do roughly the same thing in RIFE that you can do in Rails will not mean that Ruby fans will suddenly abandon it. I think *most* people who are not already invested in Java will find Rails easier to learn and to use. That doesn't mean that it will be the perfect thing for all applications, and it doesn't mean that someone who's very competent with another application framework would gain anything from moving to Rails.

That is exactly what you guys are doing to DHH. David mainly reposts emails or blog entries from other people's experiences. He does not rag on Java nearly as much as you guys claim. From my own blog:

Do you guys actually read the articles from DHH’s site or do you just look at the headlines in a list from Google? DDH has spent a good chunk of time doing Java development, he is not just pulling this out of nowhere. His blog is not about putting Java down, it is about recounting his and others experiences with different technologies.

For example, one post leads with the title: Java is ‘too easy’. If you just read that, you might say, “see, David is putting Java down". Actually, no he isn’t. Read the first line from that post:

“Let me underline one thing: There are surely many great Java programmers and there are surely many great ideas coming out of the Java community.”

He goes on to quote another Java developer’s blog, someone completely unrelated to the Rails community. In fact, almost all of these posts are simply recounting other people’s independent experiences with Java. I challenge you to show how this is making fun of Java.

According to the Laszlo site, the Laszlo Presentaion Server requires the following:

Java Runtime Environment (JRE) 1.4 or greater. Note that LPS requires the Java SDK, since Jakarta Tomcat, the servlet container that ships with LPS, needs the Java SDK. Tomcat 5.0.24 or Jetty I suppose since the Rife User Guide recommends it. 175 MB of Free disk space; 512 MB physical RAM and a system with a 800 Mhz processor or greater required, 1GHz recommended. In additon to your database of choice and the RIFE Framework.

How does this compare to RoR's requirements?

Thanks for your insights.

How many fcgi servers you need depends on how many pages can be cached. Requests to cached pages are be handled by the webserver, so for something like a Blog that is changed only a few times per day, you won't need more than one fcgi server, no matter if your website get one or one million hits per day.

I have tried many server solutions over the years and while VPS works well, you share the resources with other people. Also, if you go price hunting, I really noticed that the lowest price often gives you problems with service and stability later on. Personally, I recently signed up for a dedicated server with serious support and a good network infrastructure. If that's the way you want to go I suggest you look at http://leaseweb.nl, http://solidhost.com and http://rackcheck.com If you want low-cost, http://server4you.net is the one I used before.

I don't know where you can get good VPS hosting nowadays. You're probably best off searching on http://webhostingtalk.com

And, y'know, unlike the OS News editor, I don't think it's wrong for DHH to be biased. Rails is his baby and he's the primary evangelist for it. And probably, it wouldn't have gotten all the attention and buzz about it if he'd had another evangelism style that didn't ruffle feathers of those who like other platforms. If it was just about following "DRY" rigidly and having a "write a web application in 18 lines!" tutorial schtick, we'd all be talking about Maypole.

Grow up guys…

Ok, will do. The document you did provide was very informative. Thanks.

My personal take is that RoR has some neat ideas and since it's new it's fun to play with. Having said that I think Java is still better for the simple reason that there are sooo many open source libraries implemented in Java. I can build a web app on top of the Servlet API with Velocity for views without breaking a sweat. It's a little bit more work than RoR but where it really starts taking off is when I have to start integrating with other systems and services. A fine example is communicating with Yahoo IM. I still haven't found a Ruby implementation of the ymsg protocol. Then again maybe I just don't know where to look, but the point is a Google search for "java yahoo im" turns up useful libraries immediately, whereas "ruby yahoo im" does not.

Ruby has a lot of potential, as does RoR, but it still needs some more time to cook.