Rails for Java Developers [Paperback]

I had the privilege of seeing this book pre-release (being the Prsident of the Northern Virginia Java Users Group has its privileges...), and I must say, it contains material necessary for today's Java Programmer.

Love it or hate it, Rails is a platform that is geting a lot of atention these days, and a competent softare engineer cannot afford to *not* have an opinion on it... The evolution of Java is being heavily influenced by ideas from this community. And why not? Good ideas ae good ideas, no matter where they come from. Clearly, Rails contains concepts that can be 'borrowed' and brought over into Java with great success - one just has to look at the landscape of recent open source projects to see this in action (and of course, a lot of these ideas were borrowed from the Java community in the first place).

So, if you are a developer who has cut his teeth for years on Java, what is the shortest path to get up to speed with Rails? I have to recommend this book. It explains both Ruby and Rails by comparing and contrasting to things you are already familiar with from your Java experience. The authors are also exceptional presenters and writers - the book is written well and the ideas are clearly refined from battle-testing as presentation and classroom materials.

R4JD is an important book to read for Java web application developers, whether or not they are planning a move to Rails. The structure of the book is unique in that it explains concepts in Ruby, Rails, and Rake by comparing them to the equivalent functions in Java, Hibernate, Struts, JSP, JUnit, and ant. It is wonderful at helping the developer quickly learn how to do all of the things he or she already knows how to do into the Rails world. Even for the developer who is not considering using Rails at the moment, it provides a quick and useful framework for understanding the differences of the Rails way and anticipate how the Java technology stack will be responding to new ideas about the way web application development can be done. Simply understanding the structure of an end to end Rails application provides a good template for how to build a Java web application with the suite of tools used for comparison.

Specifically, the authors' coverage of the Ruby language is quite good in terms of being very clear and leading the reader from an understanding of how to write Java-style to Ruby to a deeper level of being able to write more idiomatic Ruby code. The coverage of ActiveRecord and Hibernate is quite informative, although it doesn't get into any of the approaches to caching data in Rails, it is a good introduction to the differences (Rails tends to cache views). The section on Controllers using Struts is enough to make me wish I never see another routing configuration xml file again.

One of the primary differences between Java web applications and Rails web applications is that the Java web apps tend to use a lot of configuration files written in XML. While type safety is often listed as something people like about statically typed Java, the book should point out that all of this XML plumbing is not quite type safe either. The magic of Ruby's dynamic nature and more complete object oriented features such as duck typing and mixins help provide an escape for this, where the story is really all in the code.

All in all, this is a very readable technical book. It's a quite a bit more than a reference manual and is filled with generous nuggets of wisdom that have already made me a better developer.

In "Rails for Java Developers", Stuart Halloway and Justin Gehtland provide an introduction to Ruby and the Rails web application framework aimed at the Java developer more familiar with frameworks such as Struts and Hibernate. There's a lot of buzz in the Java community surrounding Ruby and Ruby on Rails so this title is quite timely.

Halloway and Gehtland provide a tutorial to learning Ruby and Rails by examining similarities with Java. The tutorial progresses by providing examples in both Ruby and Java using popular Java frameworks. The introduction of Ruby and Rails concepts by juxtaposing them with similar concepts implemented in Java is comforting for the developer who may feel a little intimidated by the differences between the languages. Working through the book, the Java developer will learn the basics about creating and deploying Ruby on Rails applications, picking up an exciting new language along the way.

The first three chapters introduce the Ruby programming language. This is the best Java-centric Ruby introduction that I've seen and it's something I wish I had available to me when I was first learning the language. The rest of the material covers the basics of Rails applications as well as web services and security issues. I found the chapters on testing and automating the development process to be particularly good.

The approach this book takes may not be suitable for everyone. After a certain point, I found that the constant juxtaposition of the Java way of accomplishing a task with the Ruby on Rails way of accomplishing a task wore a bit thin. I found myself just trying to skip past the Java bits to get on with the Ruby. Still, I found the book to be quite good overall. If you are an experienced Java developer seeking a gentle introduction to Ruby on Rails, you can't do better than "Rails for Java Developers".