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Ruby painly needed a milestone of stability. Ruby's market is Rails, and while I admit some projects(JRuby, IronRuby, Ruboto, Macruby) trying to explore other p

by lapusta 16y ago

Ruby painly needed a milestone of stability. Ruby's market is Rails, and while I admit some projects(JRuby, IronRuby, Ruboto, Macruby) trying to explore other possibilities, they haven't got much further than exploration. So what's up with Rails? It's market won't be growing: 1. Django/Grails/Symfony/ASP.NET MVC are closing gaps in Python/Java/PHP/.NET communities, making RoR not as much attractive as it was couple years ago. Means much less new developers form these communities. 2. Today's start-ups are moving to RIA, where the UI is built via Capuccinno/SproutCore/GWT/Flex and Rails doesn't provide much benefit here compared to others. 3. Ruby hardly can fight with Python and PHP on their markets. I admit Ruby influence and innovations, but I won't put my bets on it.

steveklabnik 16y ago
Do you really see many startups moving to RIA? Maybe it's because I'm from Hicksburgh, but I don't know of one company here that's doing anything serious with RIA. We even have one guy doing an 'embedded' HTML5 app, using <video>... Most of the websites that I use aren't using RIA, either. Am I missing out on a big trend? And why can Ruby not "fight with Python and PHP on their markets?" Care to elaborate a bit?
- lapusta 16y ago
  >fight with Python and PHP on their markets? PHP has lots of opensource web-apps: OpenX, Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, phpBB, SugarCRM, Magento eCommerce, MediaWiki you can just download and run on any hosting in couple of minutes. Every app has a community behind it. Haven't heard about anything as popular built with Rails(except Redmine). Python - studied in Universities like MIT and can be found in any UNIX/Linux distribution. Lots of bindings and libraries(SciPy, NumPy, Twisted). Ruby bindings and libraries are far behind.
  - steveklabnik 16y ago
    Gotcha. I would agree about PHP, but not much about Python. It's true that universities are starting to get into Python, and not so much ruby, but bindings and libraries? I guess we're just trying to accomplish different things.
    - lapusta 16y ago
      Maybe, I was evaluating Ruby for my university tasks even before Pyhon, but found a lack of good GUI and Plot/Math libraries.
dhh 16y ago
What laughable and superficial conjecture. 1) It's great that the ideas that Rails popularized are being adopted on other platforms. But besides for Django which has a) been out for almost as long as Rails and b) uses a great dynamic language, the other camps you mention doesn't have anything resembling the "Ruby on" part. Just grabbing the grabbing the general ideas of Rails are trying to fit them into less expressive languages yields some less than desirable results. Have you actually looked and compared any of the code back and forth? 2) Hahaha. The web has been pronounced dead on more occasions that I can count, but RIA has been the boogeyman since the beginning of the last decade. Don't invest your piggybank in it happening this time. Additionally, I know of lots of Rails apps that are using all those technologies for the front end. Whether your output is HTML or Flash or whatever, you're going to need a backend to handle it. All the benefits of Ruby, Active Record, Action Mailer, and the works are as relevant as ever with that. 3. What does this even mean?! Anyway, good luck betting.
- lapusta 16y ago
  I've done some professional development with Symfony and Grails. Both close to RoR(Grails even better in my opinion). I also use Python as my scripting language, and tried Ruby/RoR, but it didn't fit my needs. I'm language agnostic, but you must remember that other languages evolve too. PHP got namespaces and closures, C# - some dynamics, and Groovy - support from SpringSource/VMWare and is most popular language on JVM: Jython, JRuby, Scala - all far behind.
- rufugee 16y ago
  In general, I agree with you. However, Rails' influence on other platforms has yielded some great projects. My current favorite is play (http://www.playframework.org http://www.playframework.org). It's almost a one-to-one feature port of Rails to Java, but actually manages to do it in a way that works very well and very pragmatically. I'm at least as productive in Play as I am in Rails, and that's after many years of Rails development.

by lapusta 16y ago

steveklabnik 16y ago

Do you really see many startups moving to RIA? Maybe it's because I'm from Hicksburgh, but I don't know of one company here that's doing anything serious with RIA. We even have one guy doing an 'embedded' HTML5 app, using <video>... Most of the websites that I use aren't using RIA, either. Am I missing out on a big trend? And why can Ruby not "fight with Python and PHP on their markets?" Care to elaborate a bit?

lapusta 16y ago
>fight with Python and PHP on their markets? PHP has lots of opensource web-apps: OpenX, Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, phpBB, SugarCRM, Magento eCommerce, MediaWiki you can just download and run on any hosting in couple of minutes. Every app has a community behind it. Haven't heard about anything as popular built with Rails(except Redmine). Python - studied in Universities like MIT and can be found in any UNIX/Linux distribution. Lots of bindings and libraries(SciPy, NumPy, Twisted). Ruby bindings and libraries are far behind.
- steveklabnik 16y ago
  Gotcha. I would agree about PHP, but not much about Python. It's true that universities are starting to get into Python, and not so much ruby, but bindings and libraries? I guess we're just trying to accomplish different things.
  - lapusta 16y ago
    Maybe, I was evaluating Ruby for my university tasks even before Pyhon, but found a lack of good GUI and Plot/Math libraries.

dhh 16y ago

What laughable and superficial conjecture. 1) It's great that the ideas that Rails popularized are being adopted on other platforms. But besides for Django which has a) been out for almost as long as Rails and b) uses a great dynamic language, the other camps you mention doesn't have anything resembling the "Ruby on" part. Just grabbing the grabbing the general ideas of Rails are trying to fit them into less expressive languages yields some less than desirable results. Have you actually looked and compared any of the code back and forth? 2) Hahaha. The web has been pronounced dead on more occasions that I can count, but RIA has been the boogeyman since the beginning of the last decade. Don't invest your piggybank in it happening this time. Additionally, I know of lots of Rails apps that are using all those technologies for the front end. Whether your output is HTML or Flash or whatever, you're going to need a backend to handle it. All the benefits of Ruby, Active Record, Action Mailer, and the works are as relevant as ever with that. 3. What does this even mean?! Anyway, good luck betting.

lapusta 16y ago
I've done some professional development with Symfony and Grails. Both close to RoR(Grails even better in my opinion). I also use Python as my scripting language, and tried Ruby/RoR, but it didn't fit my needs. I'm language agnostic, but you must remember that other languages evolve too. PHP got namespaces and closures, C# - some dynamics, and Groovy - support from SpringSource/VMWare and is most popular language on JVM: Jython, JRuby, Scala - all far behind.
rufugee 16y ago
In general, I agree with you. However, Rails' influence on other platforms has yielded some great projects. My current favorite is play (http://www.playframework.org http://www.playframework.org). It's almost a one-to-one feature port of Rails to Java, but actually manages to do it in a way that works very well and very pragmatically. I'm at least as productive in Play as I am in Rails, and that's after many years of Rails development.