Ruby's power + Java's tools = Smalltalk today
Avi Bryant of Seaside fame asks:
What if there were a Hotspot VM that ran Ruby instead of Java, without any loss of performance, and a version of Eclipse written in and for this new platform?
If you are familiar with Avi, you can see where he is going with this. He goes through a brief history of the rise of Java up to the growth of Ruby on Rails today…but decries the lack of a VM and tool support:
Ruby has no bytecoded VM, no JIT, and no IDE that can hold a candle to Eclipse or, say, VisualWorks
Avi sees Smalltalk as the logical next step, combining Ruby’s power with the environment and VM similiar to Java. Having seen Glenn’s presentation on Seaside, I can say that its an extremely powerful combination unmatched anywhere else.
However, if you look at things today, the fact of the matter is that Rails has tipped and Seaside hasn’t. So now we just need work done on things like the RubyEclipse, YARV, and RADRails, if not JRuby. Its really an exciting time to be a developer, particularily in the web app space, and I can’t wait to see where things are five years from now.