Less ranting, let’s just straight-up compare the two
Pros of Ruby on Rails:
- Quick turn-around during development (in Java/Scala you need JRebel or sbt’s reload and other such tools)
- Easy to read and debug what is in production (and, though it’s a bad practice, fix in production)
- In order to check that nothing broke, tests are written, maintained, extensive and of good quality
- One full-circle ecosystem – RubyMine as THE IDE, rake is THE build tool, gem/bundle is THE dependency manager, etc… In Java/Scala there are many alternatives, which can be daunting and cause fragmentation within a community.
Pros of Scala and Lift:
- Code isn’t a mess of gate-keeper checks, because of static type-safety
- There are libraries such as a wrapper of JQuery that gives type-safety when writing JQuery, which improves developing that part of the application.
Perhaps Ruby on Rails is the best choice, given good conventions, practices and consistency 🙂
