Right, and I'm calling Grails, Play, Scala, Vert.x Java in that article I wrote. I think a lot of Rails folks walked into a closed box in 2008, and they should have. Rails was hugely different from the alternatives back then.
The world has caught up. That's one of the points I didn't quite make very well. Ugh.
That makes sense. The landscape has definitely changed, and you're right, there are alternatives now that didn't exist when Rails was just starting.
I think Rails still has some advantages, and a head start in both development concepts and supporting libraries and frameworks. My point wasn't that Java and its kin are necessarily incapable of these things, just that Rails has had that mindset from the start, and as such deserves the mindshare that it receives.
The world has caught up. That's one of the points I didn't quite make very well. Ugh.