One Rick Bradley reports on a J2EE-turned-Rails project which is experiencing an amazing 1:25 ratio between trivial LOC counts between the two platforms.

That in itself isn't that interesting, however. I've already seen plenty of similar reports and my own experiments have hinted at something around that ballpark as well. What's interesting is that Rick needs nested transactions to implement certain regulatory requirements.

This gets us to the topic of Ruby on Rails and enterprise features.

We don't have nested transactions in the current J2EE spec but there are some workarounds available for implementing some kind of nested transactions in J2EE by hand. (Then again, how many times you've seen someone actually doing that?) As far as I know, there's no known workaround yet for implementing nested transactions with Ruby on Rails. That's a small advantage for J2EE. (Then again, I wouldn't be surprised if someone was already working on adding nested transaction support by now)

Another "enterprise feature" Rails is lacking is distributed transactions, i.e. two-phase commit. J2EE obviously has this but Rails is currently limited to simple transactions even though it is possible to split your domain objects to be persisted in multiple databases.

Authentication is another feature that people seem to have "extra" requirements for in enterprise environments. Again, Rails doesn't support Single Sign-On (SSO) out of the box but adding support for, say, perimeter authentication with SiteMinder and Apache should be as trivial as it is in J2EE.

I'd be interested to hear what other features you'd consider belonging to this "enterprise" category that Rails doesn't have (or you're not sure if it has).