Evolutionary Goo

This blog post by Paul Browne on OnJava.com nicely summarizes a lot of feelings I have had lately about the state of Java Web frameworks.

JRuby - Web 2.0 in the Enterprise Java World

While the move away from EJB2 and application servers in general was a welcome development in the past couple of years, I don’t feel that the J2EE world is any closer to simplifying Web application development. When starting a new Web project, there are still a myriad of choices to be made. JSF? Struts2? Tapestry? Spring? Hibernate? EJB3? Which Ajax library? Spring and Hibernate have become fairly standard choices, but even that is being muddied by JPA/EJB3 and new frameworks such as Seam, JRuby, Trails, Grails, etc., etc…

I’ve been following the Ruby on Rails trend as I’m sure most Java developers have and I have say that I am somewhat envious of the simpler environment in which Ruby developers work. As a Java developer, I might want to leverage my experience with Java while retaining Java functionality, so JRuby seems like a serious contender in the Java space.

Update 9/7/2006: Big news as Sun is hiring the developers of JRuby as full-time employees.
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