The future is more of a continued polyglot environment. Developers will use different programming tools/ frameworks to provide different features for their app

The future is more of a continued polyglot environment. Developers will use different programming tools/ frameworks to provide different features for their app via a service-oriented -architecture or something like that. This is an example: a chat app built with Rails, Socket.IO, Node.js and Backbone.js http://node-chatty.herokuapp.com/chatty http://node-chatty.herokuapp.com/chatty See blog post on that: http://bit.ly/zorHYA http://bit.ly/zorHYA Everything is in rails but just the chat bit that makes sense to be realtime is served by nodejs. Redis pubsub is used to communicate between rails and the nodejs chat server. You can use ruby based event-machine or async sinatra or async rack to write the chat server and communicate with them with redis and drop nodejs if you are so inclined.. In summary rails, nodejs, php, java will continue to co-exist as tools and people will use what they are most comfortable with and what gets the job done in each problem space.