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Moreover, "Ruby on Rails comes along and shows the world that you can have your cake and eat it too," Heinemeier Hansson said. Ruby on Rails shows "that you can be dynamic like PHP and Perl while still being even more maintainable and clean than Java," he said. "This naturally presents the Java world with a conundrum. Even more so because they used to be able to claim that only Java (with Sun and IBM behind it) had the marketing clout needed to go somewhere in this world. But now Rails is all the rage. What are good minds to do?"

During his keynote at TSSJS, Geir Magnusson, a member of the Apache Software Foundation and an engineer responsible for architecture for Intel's Middleware Products Division, asked the audience how many had tried out Ruby on Rails. More than half of those in attendance raised their hands. However, when he asked how many had done a production application with the framework, all but two or three people took their hands down.

That impromptu poll suggested that enterprise Java developers may not be ready to turn over key applications to Ruby on Rails. However, "What I've been seeing is that many Java developers flee upstream," Heinemeier Hansson said. "They've conceded the 'low end' - which is another word for 'what most people need most of the time' - and aimed their aspirations at 'the really hard problems … that require real men with statically typed languages!'" he said.

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