Jobster is unusual (or perhaps not, I really don’t know) in being a company that does extensive development in both Rails and J2EE/Spring/Hibernate, and that has developers who move fluidly between the two worlds. (If your company has experience with both worlds, we’d be interested in sharing learnings.)

Our flagship employer application is built on Spring, and a new consumer application (now in development and soon to be released in a limited beta) is written on Rails. The consumer application was developed rapidly by a small team of developers and is one that we intend to iterate rapidly on.

There is a tendency in most companies, I think, to believe that the whole company needs to standardize on a single technology stack, or at least that specific developers need to specialize.

Given the very different audiences and requirements of the two major applications we are building, I think the “one stack to rule them all” argument is false. For the end user application, rapid iteration and learning is essential, while we have to be more deliberate and careful about how we change the experience for recruiters using the application. Conversely, our employer application plays more to the strength of J2EE through requirements for things like multi-column primary keys, distributed transactions, and so forth.

Our experience has been that a team of strong developers grounded in the MVC model of Spring finds the transition to Ruby and Rails easy and enjoyable, and that they do enjoy greater productivity. We’re very excited about what Rails allows us to do.