The State of Ruby on Rails

kev — Sun, 16 Oct 2005 17:01:00 -0400

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”.

"The State of Ruby on Rails" by Kev

Sun, 16 Oct 2005 18:59:51 -0400

Ulysses is Nicholas Seckar. Sam is Sam Stephenson. Madrobby is Thomas Fuchs. Xal is Tobias Luetke.

"The State of Ruby on Rails" by Devin Mullins

Sun, 16 Oct 2005 18:46:21 -0400

meh.

"The State of Ruby on Rails" by Devin Mullins

Sun, 16 Oct 2005 18:46:11 -0400

The list of committers:

nextangle – DHH csshsh – Florian Weber minam – Jamis Buck bitsweat – Jeremy Kemper bitserf – Leon Breedt noradio – Marcel Molina Jr. nzkoz ulysses sam- htonl – Scott Barron madrobby xal

Didn’t get all the full names, though. (Is the full list available somewhere on the web?)

Gluttonous: The State of Ruby on Rails

The State of Ruby on Rails

What an amazing year

It didn’t start out like that

Last step: Then you WIN

The Next Big Step: The book

Poster Children

Envy

But why?

Now what?

Tools in the chain

Creating an industry

Getting organized

Web team, sysadmin

RailsConf?

"The State of Ruby on Rails" by Kev

"The State of Ruby on Rails" by Devin Mullins

"The State of Ruby on Rails" by Devin Mullins