thanks for your answer.
I agree with you that the productivity of Rails is not only because of Ruby (although Ruby definitely made some cool Rails stuff possible that couldn't be done with other languages). Some of the reasons why Rails is so productive for certain types of applications are:
- DRY
- Convention over configuation
- intelligent defaults
- not XML hell

It's great to see that Spring has also reduced the XML stuff to a minimum with version 2.5.

Markus

I do think Grails is interesting. I probably should have mentioned it on slide 12.

I don't believe that the productivity of RoR is entirely attributable to the Ruby language, and I believe there is plenty more than can be done to boost productivity in Java-based frameworks and platforms, regardless of whether or not people write their application classes in Java.

I agree that we'll probably see increasing use of dynamic languages on the JVM, which is a platform not merely a runtime for a single language.

Rgds
Rod

Ron, what do you think of Grails? It uses Spring and other cool stuff and gives you the power of a scripting language and the productivity of Rails.
It would be very interesting to know your opinion of Grails.

I want to add to your predictions that I think that dynamic languages will become more important on the JVM and in enterprise Java, especially Groovy, but probably also Ruby and Python.