"J2EE Goodness" - What's Your Experience?

First, let me say, "I appreciate Rails goodness."

Rails is a well-though-out web application development technlogy stack, lots of Rail's actionview helpers (formatting, pagination, link_to, etc.), support for powerful templating enginges (.erb, .haml, etc), Convention over configuration, plugin-architecture, fast development cycles, and the list just goes on and on.

Now, with JRuby, Rails can benefit from J2EE goodness.

* Performance - JRuby apps performance pretty much equals old-school Java-based J2EE web apps.

* J2EE Deployment Standards - J2EE has mature packaging and deployment tools and methodologies.

* Cost - Some shops already have J2EE app servers... with JRuby, I didn't have to convince management  to install a cluster of Mongrel servers...just leverage existing resources.

I have found that the web application performs at the same levels as old-school J2ee web applications (SpringMVC, Struts, etc), but it's delivered alot sooner...and it covers NFR's better than typical Rails deployments.

I also found that creating a .war or .ear package to be pretty painless, so I've enjoyed the best of both worlds.

Granted, having the extra JRuby filter and runtime jar files add hidden, potential risks... but for me, the benefits far out-weigh the costs.

What has your experience with Rails on JRuby been?

p.s. Sorry about the title... I used "J2EE Goodness" as a teaser to get you to read this post ;-)

 

Tagged:
jruby rails j2ee