Decaflon

I should also note that Compete tells a different story.

Rails has a long way to mature yet. The performance is horrendous, despite being offset by rapid development time.

Actually Rails is..maybe 6 years old, Ruby itself being 18 years old. Ruby was developed in 1993, and it wasn't until 2001 when the guy who created 37Signals developed a very well organized framework and released it did Rails become something.

Even then, it wasn't until 2005 did Rails really pick up and gain momentum.

dook said:
"Actually Rails is..maybe 6 years old, Ruby itself being 18 years old."

Rails can really only be dated to its release. The time it spent as an internal tool doesn't really count. If Rails were 6 years old and maintaining popularity, I wouldn't have a problem finding blog content on it, and companies wouldn't have problems finding Rails developers.

Well, as I said, it wasn't until 2005 until it gained momentum. Rails was actually released as a framework in 2001 and was more or less just sitting there for 4 years.

I don't think it's dead at all. The demand for ruby developers is extremely high in the Silicon Valley. ;)

@ dook: where did you get that information from? Could you point to a source ?

Umm... 2005?

I certainly hope that Ruby on Rules isn't losing momentum. I just picked up a few books and have been trying to teach it to myself for the last few days.

Tobie said:
"where did you get that information from? Could you point to a source?"

I can't verify Dook's numbers, but from what I've gleaned across the internet, Ruby is about 12 years old and Rails is approaching its 3rd birthday.

bgilham said:
"I certainly hope that Ruby on Rules isn't losing momentum. I just picked up a few books and have been trying to teach it to myself for the last few days."

I'd definitely like to see it stay popular as well. I'm about to independently release my first public Rails app soon, and I'd love to see what other people have been doing with it.

@Ozone42: I don't think the performance is that bad really. The 37signals' apps seem speedy enough and the Joyent stuff is no slower than traditional apps built in PHP or Perl.

I think that it SEEMS slow because there are a lot of pieces to the puzzle needed to make a Rails app actually deployable. With PHP, you just upload your files, connect it to a Database and go. With Rails, we start to see the addition of technology that traditionally hasn't been used (well, not used, really more like not popular). All of a sudden, we're getting into massive talks about Load Balancers and Rails Containers, etc. What we need now is documentation from people that have successfully deployed a Rails app that really breaks down all of the highs and lows on what you will really encounter as you try to deploy a Rails app.

@ Teej: approaching it's third birthday and actually released as a framework in 2001 (that's what dook claimed) are not exactly similar.

So just to get some facts straight, from Wikipedia:

Ruby on Rails was extracted by David Heinemeier Hansson from his work on Basecamp, a project-management tool by the web-design company 37signals. It was first released to the public in July 2004.

And about Ruby:

The language was created by Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto, who started working on Ruby on February 24, 1993, and released it to the public in 1995.

As part of my note, I meant to include a link from an interview with David Hansson of 37Signals.

Hype always goes in a pretty predictable cycle for technology. While the Gartner Group does plenty that seems clueless, their "hype cycle" definitely fits with what we see over and over with how technologies develop and get hyped.

I won't venture to say exactly where on the curve that Rails is, but if you're feeling a drop in the hype, it's probably just on its way to maturity.

http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?id=484424

I don't think anyone can argue that some of the hype has disappeared, but rails is going strong. Traffic to my blog keeps increasing, and do does the number of subscribers. The upcoming rails conf sold out in a very short time, with more tickets than before. version 1.2 came out recently and work on 2.0 is going strong.

Could be that people are too busy doing it that they don't spend so much time talking about it?

BTW, it seems, me included, tag with rails instead of "ruby on rails" where you'll see more activity.

So Rails is doing just fine :)

Well Ruby on Rails definitely has a lot to prove to the community who are used to C style programming. Rails is not an easy thing to learn and actually is very counter-intuitive at first. Also, the same familiarity doesn't apply to Ruby. I think a lot of people also get lost by the short-hand form, especially when this is the first examples of the code they see. Remember, the only shorthand in C style programming are with the arithmatic operators and incrementers/decrementers (+=, *=, --, etc.) whereas some of the elements of the Ruby style programming are very cryptic.

Also, with regards to the distinct "heavy encouragement" of the MVC architecture (though, it's absolutely great), novice developers that might be used to sloppily placing all of their logic into a Web page and renaming it to a .php will be discouraged from this. Rails has many deployment woes and frustrations that PHP does not. Ruby and Rails have one of the highest learning curves I've ever encountered with a language and a framework, respectively, so don't be so skeptical that the "hype is over". It really has just begun. It's just going to take a lot of maturing to do.

I have a feeling that Ruby on Rails is going to really help the community because it's going to discourage spaghetti code and bad programming practices.

Jared, definitely agree with you about the cryptic shorthand RoR syntax, coming from a C/Java background it really trips me up.

"I have a feeling that Ruby on Rails is going to really help the community because it's going to discourage spaghetti code and bad programming practices."

I'm not sure if it'll help the community per sé, but mor the professional as a whole. I'd say PHP helps people get acclimated to programming in general better than RoR because PHP lets you dive in quickly and do things faster than RoR which you need to setup and finesse in order to create apps (if you're not using their exact folder structure.)

Rails development is my main livelihood at the moment and I don't see or feel it decreasing in popularity despite a potential drop in the hype factor. As it is the softening of RoR hype is probably welcomed by most outside and many inside of the community.

A recent talk by Bruce Tate got me thinking that maybe there isn't much to worry about in terms of RoR's future except where all it's increasing popularity leads.