Rails, Grails and .NET MVC

Posted on May 3rd, 2009

We certainly do have a lot of choices when building applications these days! :) Here is a little insight into my latest project application choice. It might or might not work for you and it is not intended to be a guide per se since as good programmers know – pick what makes sense for your application.

I needed a new web application that was only going to be used for internal administration and so I could do something fun and not care about how it scales. Here are a couple key requirements so we can discuss over them. Firstly, I need page authentication and I have no need for a database since I’ll use SimpleDB so the DAL isn’t as important.

My initial thought was, lets just roll with Rails since in the last couple months I’ve been doing a lot of R&D using Ruby and Rails however I recently started some work on Grails and so the decisions begin.

Let me prefix first by saying I could have built this using .NET MVC and I believe that would have been the fastest way, sorry but it is – that isn’t bias for Microsoft just a fact especially since my skills lie heavily in that area … but I wanted something more fun :)

ASP.NET MVC

• Easy to use for sure, especially if you’re already a .NET developer.
• Tools are fantastic.
• Authentication is as simple as using the [Authorize] decoration on your controllers.
• Data is via an existing SimpleDB Provider I wrote.
• Doesn’t run well on anything but IIS
• No exposure to other technologies <- the fun part :)

Ruby on Rails

• I think Ruby is pretty easy to learn.
• The tools are getting better – don’t be a hero, use and IDE like NetBeans/Eclipse.
• If you have complex database requirements activerecord is going to be painful for you.
• I’ve found the community a bit broken with Rails, you can generally get help but not always the easiest to understand.
• Far too many depreciated gems floating around and even the Rails wiki is out of date.
• As for authentication, well nothing easy to find – does require more code than I’d like. Not sure what is best.
• SimpleDB access was OK but not great, relative name spaces break when importing classes while using Amazon libraries so that wasn’t cool. Had to hard code some paths.

Grails

• Just started R&D on this and I didn’t feel like jumping into Groovy although it is close to Ruby I’d rather learn one new thing at a time.
• Does have the huge benefit of running on the JVM and also being able to use existing java classes.
• Can be deployed on well established application servers, so that is great.
• Tools are ok, new at this stage but Netbeans seems to do the job.
• Authentication is ok, there is a good plugin but still requires far too much code for my liking compared to .NET
• I can’t find a Grails/Groovy SimpleDB library but there is one for Java so I guess I can just use that.

and then I found ….

JRuby

• Will allow me to keep on the learning curve with Ruby but
• Lets me deploy in single packages and do java application containers.
• Exposes me to more java technology.
• Tools are pretty good and I’m using NetBeans right now.

So that kinda sealed the deal. I wanted something fun and like Ruby so JRuby lets me keep that knowledge but also I get better exposure to Java technologies. You might wonder, “If you want Java exposure why not use JSP or similiar” … right, no thanks :) Keep it simple!.

I’ll post when I’ve deployed my first working JRuby application and I plan to run it on Tomcat/Ubuntu 9x.

Tags: grails, MVC, rails
Filed under .NET, Software | 2 Comments »