Will Ruby on Rails take off big time??

The Ruby on Rails bandwagon is moving at quite a pace. Looking around on the blogosphere, it almost looks like it will replace Java and .NET for web application development. Now, is this likely? Will it really happen? Well ... here is my take on it.

Background: Rails is a web-app development framework that is about 15 months young now. So, as frameworks go, it is a baby. The interesting bit is the momentum that it has gained in such a short timespan is amazing. Given, the fact that it is competing with a large number of frameworks that have been around for quite a bit longer. Not to mention that this has no 'commercial' marketing machine supporting it. Shows what a dedicated few people can achieve.

So, will it replace ASP.NET, JSP, J2EE? Short answer -- unlikely. Why? Universities are not teaching Ruby + Rails yet, and they do not seem to be in a hurry to start replacing their Java/C/C++/VB programming streams in any hurry.

Of-course, some of you may contend with an argument like "professionals will learn Rails if it will save them time", "IT people will invest a few weeks of their time learning new things because it is cool". Ofcourse, both arguments assume (incorrectly) that full-time professionals will be able to dedicate 2-5 weeks full-time learning a new framework, and then attempt to build something with it. This is the big problem with something totally new, radically different. Java worked because it built on top of C like syntax which is already used widely, so it cuts the resistance curve. The other thing with professional developers is their skills are incremental, i.e. they have picked up bits and pieces of new things over a period of 3-5 years. This eventually makes them quite good even with a monster like J2EE. Learning Rails means we need to invest a large pool of time in a short burst, and this is quite hard for full-time professional developers.

Rails is well thought out -- and it will take time to learn. Ruby will take time to learn -- developers need assigned free-time to be comfortable with its API, the IDE's, the tools and its bugs/workarounds. And, we need books like "Rails for Java developers".

Then there is the chiken-egg problem, for a framework to take off big time, we need a large pool of people that know how to use that framework. People will invest time if something is already popular (or) looks likely to take off.

After having played with it a bit, I really hope that something like Rails becomes available for Java/C# soon (with the same power). It certainly makes developing web applications easy, and I'm starting to appreciate the power behind the idea 'convention over configuration' -- which is really what underpins the UNIX way.