ASP.NET 2.0 vs Ruby on Rails?

[Guest]

Hi,

I've spent the past few weeks desperately looking for good comparisons
on ASP.NET 2.0 vs Ruby on Rails.

At the moment I'm considering migrating from ASP.NET 1.1 to ASP.NET
2.0. I'm excited about ASP.NET 2.0 and it's new features but... I'm
also aware of the rediculous development time spent on an average
website.

So I'm wondering if my time an investement is better spent on RoR than
on ASP.NET 2.0. VS2005 is a wonderful IDE but C# is perhaps too
elaborate for speedy development.

Can anyone give me real life experiences on switching from ASP.NET to
RoR development? Is it really as good as the hype says it is? Is it
worthy of a long-term investment in time and money?

Or, seeing as I'm posting on a MSDN newsgroup, can anyone tell me a good
argument for NOT switching to RoR?

I really want to get to the bottom of this. I've been advocating
ASP.NET for a long time but now I'm having doubts about it. Maybe RoR
is the way to go?

Thanks,

Mansour Ghaoui

 

[jhcorey]

I've also been looking for this, and I've had some of the same thoughts
as you regarding ASP.NET 2.0. I get the impression that most RoR users
are coming from java.

I could well imagine a corporate environment where either one or the
other technology was chosen based on project requirements.

Jim

 

[Joerg Jooss]

Thus wrote Mansour,

Hi,

I've spent the past few weeks desperately looking for good comparisons
on ASP.NET 2.0 vs Ruby on Rails.

At the moment I'm considering migrating from ASP.NET 1.1 to ASP.NET
2.0. I'm excited about ASP.NET 2.0 and it's new features but... I'm
also aware of the rediculous development time spent on an average
website.

So I'm wondering if my time an investement is better spent on RoR than
on ASP.NET 2.0. VS2005 is a wonderful IDE but C# is perhaps too
elaborate for speedy development.

Can anyone give me real life experiences on switching from ASP.NET to
RoR development? Is it really as good as the hype says it is? Is it
worthy of a long-term investment in time and money?

Or, seeing as I'm posting on a MSDN newsgroup, can anyone tell me a
good argument for NOT switching to RoR?

Let me try to be the devil's advocate... (the funny thing is that same could
be said from a Java EE perspective)

- Is Ruby powerful enough to run enterprise scale applications? It's a great
OO language, yet it's still a interpreted scripting language. That's exactly
the model Microsoft disbanded moving from ASP to ASP.NET.

- Do you need to do more than Ye Olde Web Application? What about integrating
legacy backends? Need to talk to some SAP R/3? What about information worker
driven portal use cases that have SharePoint written all over it?

- How relevant is Ruby or RoR in the marketplace? What great enterprise scale
web apps have been built on RoR? Are companies (your customers) willing to
standardize on Ruby? Remember that many companies need reliable technology
partners for a long term relationship.

Let's face it: RoR is a great solution for a very specific range of applications.
The solution to all our problems remains undiscovered, though ;-)

Cheers,