Hype: Ruby on Rails
via Slashdot, an article on Ruby on Rails.
Maybe you've heard about Ruby on Rails, the super productive new
way to develop web applications, and you'd like to give it a try, but you don't
know anything about Ruby or Rails. This article steps through the development
of a web application using Rails. It won't teach you how to program in Ruby,
but if you already know another object-oriented programming language, you should
have no problem following along (and at the end you can find links on learning
Ruby).
Now maybe I'm just a bit biased since my framework isn't getting all the slashdotters oohing and awwing over it, but I think Ruby on Rails is way over hyped. The tutorial here is great and gave me a very good overview of what it does. At the end of the day, RoR is simply a RESTful CRUD framework.
There isn't anything wrong with that. I think we need more of these "low barrier" frameworks. However, to proclaim that RoR revolutionizes web application development is just ludicrous. Anyone who has written a very large application (thousands of concurrent users and/or hundreds of thousands of gigabytes) knows that a CRUD framework just doesn't cut it. Mapping web UI directly to the DB never scales.
Form processing, payroll, etc probably work very well with RoR. But trying to implement Spoke using RoR would be impossible -- the schema is just too complex.
One thing that is certain: the RoR (and LAMP, I suppose) crowd sure does have a great marketing effort. Once I finish my book, I plan to do a better job letting the world know about all the awesome things at OpenSymphony and other Java open source products.