I’ve been reading the RESTful Web Services book. I like it a lot. The only thing I don’t like is that there is too much Ruby in it. Ruby, please, go away. Might be a good scripting language, I don’t know, but to push Ruby or any typeless language for that matter as the way to do things, is just plainly irresponsible. Hey, I’ve been there. Done projects in Perl, Tcl, and Python. The 1st few weeks of the projects are highly productive. You are loving life. Then you find that you need to refactor. You need to search for usages of an object, oh, guess what, you’re screwed. Its funny to me to see that the people pushing these things are usually book writers, or get-in-get-out consultants.

Using a scripting language is like going to McDonalds. The food is quick and tastes great, but the time you spend on the toilet after just isn’t worth the whole experience. Yes, scripting gives you zero turn around development. But, if the industry is going to move to scripting, let’s rally around something type safe. How about Groovy? Sure, it has its typeless aspects, but it doesn’t stop you from doing pure type safe code. The mass of Java programmers out there can easily switch between it and Java. Or even better, improve Java (and Java EE for that matter) to make it closer to zero turn around. For example, adding the ability for schema changes in java.lang.instrument or even silly things like simplifying the package structure in Java EE.