I work for a local government in NY. We use Java extensively for our
in-house applications. Recently there has been interest in moving away
from Java for some of our applications. I’m not a developer per se,
but I’ve been coming up to speed to make the pitch.
My understanding is that RoR’s strengths lie in simple CRUD database
apps, where there is data in tables that needs to be managed by web
pages. And Ruby can interact with Java via JRuby.
In terms of integration with messaging: if there are Ruby libraries
that can interact with MQ and put a text message on a queue, we can
pull it out using JMS no problem.
We’re also investigating OODBMS technology. Is there any development
being done with RoR and OODBMS such as db4o?
Finally, how would RoR compare to Adobe’s Flex? This is probably
comparing apples to oranges, but there has been interest in Flex as
well.
I can’t answer all your questions, but I can give you some pointers. You
could also interact with Java using webservices (SOAP, REST, WSDL, …).
I have build a Rails application that interacts with Solr (Lucene based
search engine) using a RESTful approach.
And you are right you can’t compare Rails with Flex. Flex always needs a
dynamic language behind it, that could be Coldfusion, PHP, Java, .NET or
Rails. So you could use Flex as a frontend and Rails as a backend.
Why not investigate the combination of putting Flex and Rails together?
You can go to http://flexiblerails.com/ and get a lot of information.
Peter A.'s working on a eBook on the subject. You don’t need
FlexBuilder or Flex’s data services to build a Rails app with a Flex UI.
Thank you to both you and Nick for responding so quickly. Flexible
Rails, never would have thought of that. I did find an answer to my MQ
issues at http://rubyforge.org/projects/reliable-msg/