I'm really glad to see that Sun is supporting the JRuby project now, and seems to be supporting scripting languages in general. I feel like now I don't have to give excuses at work. I've been developing web applications used Sun-wide internally for over a year and a half now. I work as a quality engineer in Operations, so I'm not really surrounded by Java developers, but I've still received the occasional question asking why I didn't develop in Java (or Perl, another favorite here). The truth is that I just don't know much Java, and some attempts to learn J2EE a couple of years ago frustrated me a bit. Also, I already knew some PHP, so I developed in PHP at Sun for a couple of years until I got good at it. Then I found Rails and tried it out. I immediately got it installed on my server and started developing in Rails from then on.

I like Rails because it provides that perfect mix of coding ease and structure. The Ruby language is extremely flexible, easy to understand, and truly object-oriented. PHP provides much of this, but the language is much more verbose. PHP seems to be a gateway language for many new developers (myself included, aside from some C/C++ in college), and not surprisingly, there are a lot of bad PHP applications out there (I am the guilty author of some). Ruby, on the other hand, is being learned for the most part by new Rails developers. The Rails framework definitely helps new developers create well-organized applications from the beginning. Basically, if PHP would have become popular because of a framework, we wouldn't have as much bad PHP code out there. I really like PHP still, but I like the Ruby/Rails stack better. When I do write PHP code, I try to structure it as well as possible, usually with a variety of PEAR libraries and using CakePHP as a framework (CakePHP follows a lot of Rails-like conventions, and is a very good framework). I wish the PHP books I read when I first started out used a good framework to teach with. However, if they had, we might not have needed this "Rails Revolution".

With JRuby, I hope to see Ruby get faster, and maybe I'll learn Java so I can write fast, compiled portions of my future Rails apps. Long live Java and Ruby!