But all is not lost for Java, which still enjoys advantages in areas such as security, based on feedback at the Ruby on Rails Camp event, held Thursday at the IBM Almaden Research Center.

Not long into the morning festivities, Ruby on Rails faced off against Java in the minds of the 150 attendees and organizers. Ruby is a trendy, object-oriented scripting language; Ruby on Rails is an open source Web framework leveraging Ruby. A theme of the event was how to use Ruby in business applications.

Although Ruby on Rails programs run slower than Java systems, Ruby is much easier for programmers to use, said Max Dunn, an event organizer and programmer. He argued that it may be cheaper to use Ruby on more servers than it is to hire more Java programmers who would need fewer servers. Silicon, as in more servers, may be cheaper than carbon, as in more programmers, he explained.

"Ruby, you read it and it reads like natural language. That attracts me," said Wido Menhardt, a conference organizer and programmer.

"Ruby is a really good thing. It has its pluses and it has its minuses," said independent programmer David Pollak, an attendee and presenter at the event.