> Java and C# are of course equally boring, but I think the fact that Rails is culturally open source provides a huge benefit over them. Java is culturally ope

> Java and C# are of course equally boring, but I think the fact that Rails is culturally open source provides a huge benefit over them. Java is culturally open source at this point; nearly every widely-used Java library is open source and there is a huge open source ecosystem around Java (namely everything maintained by the ASF, but there are plenty of other open source projects like Gson, etc.). Bonus points for tying in to any of the bazillion proprietary software systems also built in Java. The problem with Java is that it's so damn verbose -- it can take forever to build a moderately complex system because you just have to worry about so many things (maven, spring, jetty, etc.) just for a simple web service. This means you're spending time up front solving a lot of technical problems just to get a simple web service up and running. Rails is great because it implements a set of sensible defaults and lets you worry about product design rather than implementing yet another database backend for a user store. Its event-routing model also makes a lot more sense for the web; in Java everything is kind of a hack to link the web stuff back to the JVM. But yeah, once your project gets complex, it might as well be Java -- complex software is just complex to write. Rails kind of sucks when the "sensible defaults" don't make sense anymore because you need heavy customization. It's a great prototyping platform, and that means a lot -- but it still won't let you escape the problems caused complexity.