Ralphmiller wrote:
Any Suggestions on this?
Ralph,
I am sure most of us would like to help out if we could but the question
is a little too general. Everything you mentioned is viable in it’s own
right and if your problem domain is “no different from other
applications” then it doesn’t really matter what you choose. The
decision should be based on what type of experience you, your
developers, your support staff have with said technologies.
Having said all that, I am a big fan of Hibernate (way before the JBoss
acquisition) but I have found that development with ActiveRecord is much
quicker and easier. This assumes ofcourse that your schema adopts to
Rails conventions or is at the design stage. ActiveRecord also works
with legacy schemas but it’s obviously not as straight forward.
Hibernate has a heavy dependency on XML configuration and/or JDK 1.5
annotations which is more configuration details that your SEs will have
to support while ActiveRecord heavily relies on meta programming
(belongs_to) and sane db conventions. If legacy is not an issue (I envy
you), I would pick ActiveRecord from the get go.
As for languages, Although I have been professionally doing Java/C++
much longer than Ruby, I find that Ruby is far more intuitive and
requires much less boiler plate code to write which translates into
lower support costs for your product. Due to the fact that Ruby is
quite poetic, developers develop a strong attachment to the language and
really get into what they are doing which leads to much higher quality
code which again translates into less support costs. It has been
suggested that Ruby runs slower on the server than Java but this is
usually an unfounded statement as since 80% of the time is spent in the
DB, the server side processing doesn’t usually even factor into the
equation. I have also experienced much easier server side debugging
with Rails compared to a full fledged J2EE application container.
Please take all this with a grain of salt as I don’t know the details of
your problem domain and I am strongly Ruby biased as I simply adore the
language.
Not to start a flame war but one amazing feature of developing on Macs
is TextMate and that is worth the price of admission right there.
Everyone has an editor preference but it’s hard to beat text mate
bundles.
As for DBs, it all depends upon the requirements of your problem domain.
Clustering? Replication? Fail-Over?, DBA assets? If you have a PL/SQL
DBA in house, then Oracle may be your ticket. I myself prefer MySQL BUT
like I said, suggesting a DB without knowing the specifics of the
problem domain is ludicrous.
I hope this at least gives you some hints and I wish your startup all
the best. If I had to start my own startup based on a brand smacking
new DB application, could get any resource that we required, had
investors that would never say no, could use the development process I
wanted, had coders that were young at heart, curious, and brave, and I
could hand pick ALL the requirements of the app, I would go with
something like this
Rails/ActiveRecord
MySQL
Mac/TextMate
Apache/Mongrel
HAML
SVN
Fridays’ off
Breakfast in bed
XBOX
Lots of adoring fans
Corner office overlooking a peaceful lake
Big 27" monitor
Lots of good quality, affordable restaurants within walking distance
Winning lottery ticket
Mothering law that couldn’t speak English
ilan
