“It’s Java all the way”
“If you drop static methods, then welcome to Java and its billions of useless factories.”
“Your mention of ‘factories’ gives me nightmares about Java-style over/premature abstraction where you need to interact with (and therefore understand) WAY too many different classes to get anything done.”
Those are some quotes that come from only one discussion triggered by Nick, me and Michal only because our ideas sounded a bit Java-like.
History
Part of the Java-hate comes from the historical reasons. When Rails appeared lots of Java people switched to it as it solved some of the problems with Java. I was one of them.
Rails was simpler than the existing Java frameworks. It let us solve most of the problems much faster than with Java. Ruby as a language was and still is a big advantage. Its syntax is more concise. Even though I still prefer Rails than Java based frameworks I don’t get why so many Rails people simply hate Java.
Java and XML
I always disliked the XML impact on the Java frameworks. It didn’t come from nowhere, though, let’s be fair. Java as a languages is not as readable as Ruby, so it wasn’t perfect for configuration. Yaml wasn’t popular and JSON was still not really mature back in 2000. Something had to be chosen and that was XML. What would you do better back then?
It doesn’t mean that whenever some Java-like idea is presented then somehow you have to be scared that you’d have to use XML again. Let’s try not to be biased and look at Java ideas without the XML bias.
Java and over-abstraction
Yes, often Java frameworks were very abstract and overgeneralized. Again, it was a result of Java lack of dynamic features. Whenever you needed a pluggable system in your code you had to abstract away some concepts in order to make it work. Ruby lets us do it much easier and that’s cool.
Java and good things
There is lots of good things that came from Java to the Rails world. Most of the TDD/BDD stuff comes from Java. Refactoring came to us from Java [UPDATE: What I mean is that those techniques came to the Rails world *through* the Java world, they're not originally from Java]. They became popular in the Rails world. That’s cool. There are other techniques that are great, but somehow didn’t get so popular:
Dependency Injection and Inversion of Control
These two techniques are great for many reasons. They suggest that you should expose your dependencies in the constructor or through setters. It reduces the usage of globals and static methods and simplifies testing. In my opinion they result in much better object oriented design.
POJO - Plain Old Java Objects
This is one of the places where I felt I made a step back when entered Rails from Java. In Java there was a clear trend that your business classes should be clear from any framework dirtiness. Persistence was configured and injected from outside (or through annotations). When your business classes are not polluted with framework stuff it’s much easier to test them in isolation. In Rails there are many tries but no good solution on how to test models without a database.
Aspect Oriented Programming
I was involved in the AOP movement in my Java life. AOP was the tool that let you intercept method calls and run some crosscutting code from one place. If you needed logging of method calls and params, it was just 3 lines of code in an aspect and all of your method calls were traced. Similarly, it was possible to handle persistence with AOP. Another part of AOP was composing classes from smaller pieces. Fortunately, this part now appears in the Ruby world in form of the DCI architecture. The dynamic part (interception of methods) didn’t get very popular. We have some limited AOP with filters in Rails controllers and callbacks in Rails models, but we could go further and use it for persistence or for logging.
Let’s stop the hate
It’s cool that we, as a community, strongly identify with some techniques. What I’d love to see is more tolerance for other technologies.
There are smart things in the Java world but we have to be open to reuse what’s most cool and replace the bad parts with Ruby awesomeness. When someone starts his talk with “In Java this problem is solved by …” don’t laugh and interrupt with quotes like “OMG, XML and factories again”. It didn’t happen only to me. I have seen this behavior at Ruby conferences very often. It's childish.
Many good things came from the Java world - we should love them for that.
There are more large Java systems than Ruby ones. They abstract for reasons. They use IoC and DI for good reasons. AOP is awesome when used in a good way. Let's learn more from Java - it will help us once we work more with larger systems and codebases. They already learnt their lessons.
[Discussion on Hacker News: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2793227 ]
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