Gluttonous

The State of Ruby on Rails

Posted by kev Sun, 16 Oct 2005 21:01:00 GMT

David Heinemeier Hansson

What an amazing year

Rails last year was a part of the ruby circle. Over the past year, we’ve seen an explosive growth in Ruby and Rails. ( A significant number of the crowd are being paid to do Rails. )

Showed a quote from a J2EE programmer who was unhappy doing J2EE and would rather be doing rails. “I face quite the quandary, J2EE pays quite well”.

People who would otherwise not be interested in Ruby are taking notice because of what is happening now. People who have something to lose are still considering working with Ruby.

Even after building a career, mostly around Java Development, people are looking for an alternative; Ruby and RoR is consistently providing that alternative.

It didn’t start out like that

We went through four phases:

• First they ignore you
  • Why do we need this new language? Isn’t there PERL and Python?
  • The first barrier is to get awareness out
• Then they laugh at you
  • Once awareness is out, people make fun: “Its a toy language, and a framework on top of it.”
  • People care enough to make jokes out of you
• Then they fight you
  • This was a repercussion from pushing out the barriers in step one.
  • Java developers struck back to discredit Ruby and Rails

Showed a quote from a Java developer, “About tadalist, that application is so stupid that I’m wondering how the hell it could have taken him 600 lines to write it.” – Geert Bevin

Geert Bevin writes, “Move over Ruby on Rails, Java can be concise too!”

Enter screen shots comparing lines of code.

Last step: Then you WIN

• Since rails was released, 150,000 downloads from rubyforge. Gems celebrated 1 million downloads, half a million were rails.
• Slashdottings all over the place, a credit each time someone tries to build a “Rails Killer”
• At least 9 ruby on rails slashdottings
• 9,738 posts found via technorati

Key component of adoption: word of mouth from people like Martin Fowler.

The Next Big Step: The book

• As ruby was written in 2001 with PickAxe, Agile Web Development is Rails’s PickAxe
• Yesterday it was #2 on Amazon’s computer book list, sold over 20,000 copies
• In last 7 days 2,475 copies of the book shipped from distributor

These are indicators its taking off and people care

Huge list of people from many different countries being paid to work in Rails on the Rails Wiki. 400+ professionals from 55 countries.

Poster Children

• 37 Signals
• 43 Things/places/people doing over 1 million page views a day
• Odeo
• Strongspace from TextDrive

Envy

• Been cloned in many languages
  • Sails/trails in java
  • Monorail for .NET
  • Biscuit: PHP on Rails
  • Grails for Groovy
  • Cake PHP
  • Catalyst for PERL
  • Subway and Turbo Gears for Python

But why?

*I think one of the explanations is absolute competition is not an absolute good. *A large number of web frameworks isn’t necesarily good. *We don’t have 10 implementations of each library in ruby, or CPAN.

• Ruby on Rails tried to include “just enough to make it worth it, not enough to discourage”
  • Its the same processes, but done in a language which “doesn’t hurt”
• We tell people stories that people were ready to hear
  • J2EE was too complex, and there’s room for something else

Now what?

• The most important big next step: 1.0
• Hoping to press out the release candidate for 1.0 later this afternoon.
• Next: The ‘platform’

Tools in the chain

• Want to make more apps supporting Rails
  • SwitchTower - Deployment application
  • Shipping alongside 1.0
  • About moving Rails up (to multi-machine deployments)
  • Gauge - Monitoring a clustered Rails application
  • The next app: real time distributed monitoring
  • Conductor - Should make development “nicer”
  • About moving Rails down
  • CocoaMySql-like interface for Rails, so you don’t have to create tables by hand
  • Scaffolding - making it more suitable for permanent use
  • Naked Objects: A gui with which you can control the domain model

Creating an industry

Vendors who provide services for Rails developers.

• TextDrive
• Making it simpler for getting more than a simple Rails app going

Getting organized

• Until earlier this year, David had the only commit keys to the repository
  • This was needed for some time
• Now 12 on the core team with commit

Web team, sysadmin

• A nice face helps
• We need to work on it

RailsConf?

“A swell idea”

Questions? Q: You’re a good marketer, where do you get it?

A: Just doing it. Don’t be afraid to step over the boundary. Investigate where the line in the sand is. Be passionate about something. Be interested in getting others to join your passion. “The Innovator’s Solution” and the “Innovator’s Dilemma” are both great. Kathy Sierra from Creating Passionate Users (blog) is also excellent and will have a book up.

Q: Why bother In 10 words or less?

A: I was on the plane to the US a year and a half ago. I was sitting next to a young mormon and coming back from his 2 years in Norway. What he said to me really resonated. I asked, “Why would you want to do this?”. He said, “Well, I think it would be selfish if I knew the truth or a better way and I wasn’t sharing it”. Thats some of it, also, “Its fun”.