It is quite possible that Kathy Sierra writes what is the best blog on the Internet. The relentless shift from developer-focus to user-focus is something that is becoming more important pretty much on an hourly basis.
One thing that really got me thinking about this was the recent video of 37 Signals (Jason and David) that’s been making the rounds, you know, the Mac one.
Albeit the video is a bit on the glam side (maybe I’m only saying that because I don’t have their stunning good looks?). At any rate, one of the things that David says in the video is:
“We’re trying to affect both our peers in the industry and also customers out there, just raise their level of expectation…”
This seems to go along with the whole theme of Creating Passionate Users – but why I bring it up here is for the following reason (Warning: Gross Stereotype Ahead):
People who write apps in Ruby on Rails care about user experience. People who write Java apps don’t give a rip.
-me
(Ok – I’ll make an exception for JIRA). I can feel the flames flying this way already, but this has been more often than not what I have observed in the past year or so. It’s not that Rails provides some sort of Magickal Code that isn’t possible to provide in a Java-based application – it’s that Rails makes it easy for the developer to integrate those features. I mean, forgive me if you like Java Server Faces – but the last time I looked at that code – I ended up in a psychiatric ward for a month before deciding that I’ll just stick with JSP, thanks.
After our Singapore Ruby meetup a couple weeks back, I was chilling with Herry and Choon Keat over a bite to eat – and the primary things that we seemed to be constantly coming back to when discussing Java vs. Ruby were along the lines of:
- It makes us more productive
- The code is cleaner, smaller, simpler, less bloated
- It’s easy to create rich, responsive and enjoyable user experiences
- We are a lot happier when we’re coding in Ruby.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that Ruby is now the de facto standard language and “you will be assimilated” all borg-style, I’m just saying that if it’s a feasible language to use for a given project, and Java is equally feasible – I’ll take Ruby in a heartbeat.
It’s about time that the end-users of software start raising their expectations, and time for developers to deliver software to their end-users that doesn’t suck. And one of the major driving forces of this in the past 12 months has been Ruby on Rails, along with some great JavaScript libraries like Prototype and Script.aculo.us. So thanks, guys.
