Anyone remember the Amiga? My memory may be a bit fuzzy, but I remember its architecture as being light-years ahead of its time. One of its most remarkable features was its ability to display millions of colors at a time when the PC was limited to 16. Because of its advanced color and graphic capabilities, it eventually became the basis for NewTek’s Video Toaster, an advanced (for its time) and inexpensive (for its time) video processing system. We’re talking at least 15 years ago, when video on the PC wasn’t even a pipe dream.
So, where am I going with this? The Amiga’s strengths were its downfall. It was relegated to a niche market and eventually withered on the vine. It seems to me that a disproportionately large portion of the buzz around Groovy (what buzz there is) is centered around Grails. Now, Grails may be great, but Groovy is so much more. If Grails becomes the primary reason to adopt Groovy and then loses its head-to-head bout with ROR, Groovy may go the way of the Amiga: excellent but ignored.
I think there’s very little danger of that. In fact, I’d argue that RoR is much more likely to be the Amiga. It’s already becoming a hot, niche product that doesn’t play well with others. Groovy’s automatic Java integration will make all the difference.
I also think that Grails has an advantage over RoR anyway, in that it already has both Spring and Hibernate built in. Rails may be more mature, but that gap is already closing.
Comment by Ken Kousen — October 6, 2007 @ 12:42 pm
I see less and less about RoR in the news. I also believe it will be relegated to a niche product.
Comment by Robert — October 6, 2007 @ 7:11 pm
I thought the Amiga was able to display 32 colors at the same time, with 4096 in a special HAM ‘(hold and modify) mode. What was clever though, was the “same time” which was a scanline (or less). So you could switch colors every scanline and get 32 new colors (or how many you could switch with the copper during the scanline-blank) every line.
RoR will go the way of the Amiga. And the zealots back then have the same attitude as the RoR zealots have now. RoR is already out of the news and the hype is over. Several companies I know have problems with maintaining large Rails applications. Sooner or later they will drop RoR and rewrite the app. Only my guess.
Peace
-stephan
Comment by Stephan Schmidt — October 8, 2007 @ 2:33 am