building web frameworks in Java has been done quite a number of times. None is as great as Rails (I know both sides), mainly on MVC, ORM, IOC, REST and templating parts. What makes you believe this time it’s going to be really good, both powerfull, extensible and easy to pick up?

You can’t simply port Rails to Java. Rails is way to much dynamic to be cloned in Java without re-inventing yet an other scripting language (what did Groovy). Bridging two existing communities seems way better. Being so dynamic in pure java implies you use IOC and AOP a lot which will introduce a lot of complexity and either a static dependencies nightmare, either an XML nightmare.

Look for instance at the Resource Injection part of Rails (environment.rb; include module foo), it’s so simple compared to Sping all the way… ERB templating is so much greater than JSP or JSF templating. Having a dynamic language close to Javascript in templating integrate way better with web2.0 sites… So I think JRuby on Rails is indeed the way to go rather than reinventing the wheel yet one more time with a promised collapse due to the language itself.

Rapha

If they could just get Craig Mclananananananahan (sorry, couldn’t resist the hani reference) onto the team, ruby on rails could be ruined.

More seriously, I don’t understand the current fascination with RoR at Sun. If it is so great, just build a good Java web framework to get the best ideas.