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Rails Yet To Make Dent in the Enterprise
11/28/2007
"Some of the critics want to have it both ways," said Charles Nutter, co-lead developer on the JRuby project, and now full-time JRuby guy at Sun Microsystems. "They say that Rails has this problem or that problem, while they're modifying their own frameworks to work in very similar ways. In the cases where they are the most vehemently against Rails, I suspect that they can see the value, but they can't make the changes necessary to use it. They're stuck. They see people moving away from their framework of choice, and they lash out, as anyone would."
Nutter pointed to Grails, the Web framework based on the Groovy programming language, as an example.
"It ends up being basically Rails that runs on top of a bunch of Java libraries," he said. "More and more, people are learning the core principles of Rails and applying them to their own domains and frameworks."
So, what's the ardent Rails devotee to do?
"Rails is something of a new paradigm for Web development," said Josh Susser, a San Francisco-based freelance developer specializing in RoR Web apps. "It has its own particular strengths. People who don't value those strengths aren't going to get it. It's like trying to explain to a vegetarian why Kobe beef is so good. You can convince those people, but you need a track record. Rails is still a fairly new technology, so it doesn't have the track record of, say, PHP. We're just going to have to wait a couple of years for the success stories."
The San Francisco conference was the first U.S. edition of QCon, a relatively new developer conference series. The first conference was held in London in March. QCon San Francisco was sponsored jointly by the InfoQ online developer community and the Denmark-based ISV Trifork, organizers of the 10-year-old JAOO conference series. QCon San Francisco drew an estimated 400 attendees.
John K. Waters is a freelance journalist and author based in Palo Alto, CA.
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