Beyond Java

Preface

In March of 2005, I was shocked and honored to get the word that one of my books, Better, Faster, Lighter Java (O’Reilly), won a Jolt award for technical excellence. I talked about how Java? developers could buck standing conventions to build better applications, faster than before. That book will always have a special place in my heart. Yet, throughout the process, something was in the way, and I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.

Around this time, one of my customers was building an application consisting of a complex database schema with a web-based user interface. We’d been using Spring and Hibernate with Web Work, a common stack for lightweight Java development, and we’d been generally pleased. Some things bugged us, though: the amount of repetition, the proliferation of XML configuration, and the pace of our changes. On a whim, we tried Ruby on Rails, a surprisingly productive and innovative framework that’s sweeping quickly through non-Java communities, and is making some noise among Java architects, too. We were shocked with our productivity, and we moved the project to the new foundation.

Something clicked into place for me. For this kind of application, Java itself was in the way. Remove it from the equation, and I could reduce the amount of code by a factor of four, drive the XML down to one-tenth of what it was, and achieve stunning productivity, with good performance. Better still, the concepts in Better, Faster, Lighter Java still applied. For other projects, ...