Beyond Java

Chapter 7. Ruby on Rails

As I screamed uphill toward the 3-foot ledge, the voice inside my head said “Don’t fight it. Go for it.” Knowledgeable mountain bikers called the move the lunge, but I had neither named nor internalized it yet. My brain rebelled against the completely unintuitive idea that a moving biker could thrust his bike forward near the top of such a ledge and accomplish anything other than a spectacular crash, but I’d seen it work. I hit the ledge with speed and thrust the bike forward by simply pushing on the handlebars, and the bike was over the ledge. On some level, I didn’t understand that success was a possibility. Though I was safely on top, I stepped off my pedals anyway—I’d been sure that I would fail. The idea seemed too much like flying by pulling hard enough on your shoestrings. Learning this mysterious lunge would take a while.

Like the lunge, metaprogramming also seems a little unnatural to me. Then again, I’ve been coding in Java and C for most of my professional career. If you want to experience the power of a framework that uses metaprogramming extensively, Rails is the gold standard.

The Numbers Game

As a fairly content Java programmer, I really didn’t go searching for an alternative. In some ways, Rails found me. Dave Thomas and I speak at the same conference. I taught several sessions on the Spring framework with Hibernate, and I was very happy with my productivity. Of course, compared with EJB, I was very productive. Dave pointed out that even in ...