I was riding today with my friend who is a Java developer and we were having some geek chat about the current IT market (bubble). He asked, “Is there anything you can do in Ruby on Rails that you can’t do in Java?” My answer was “not really”. Of course that wasn’t the answer he was expecting from me especially that I am always bragging about RoR.

I explained to him that he could do much more things in Java due to its maturity and integration capabilities but these functionalities come at expensive price. Java/J2EE skills are hard to master and Java projects take more time to implement compared to projects written in newer languages such as Ruby.

Every once in a while I find a “Java vs Ruby on Rails” online post and I realize that there is a big confusion about the differences and similarities between the two languages. In fact, I think RoR is more likely to be adopted by Java programmers than PHP programmers because they both adhere to the same standards and practices from OO to MVC to Active Records, etc..

Java is more suited for corporate environments with legacy and heterogeneous systems. Java also is backed by big companies such as IBM, Oracle, BEA, Sun, etc.
So if you are seeking a corporate job, then probably Java/J2EE skills are more likely to get you one than RoR.
Unlike Java RoR is still young and is not yet accepted in big traditional companies.

For the rest of us, RoR is much better fit especially in agile environments with short Software Life Cycles and with web2.0 focus.

After all, learning another programming language is easy and fun. And the more languages you know the more valuable you are.