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Ruby on Rails
Yes, conceivably within a few years Ruby on Rails could emerge as a dominant web application development environment. But I am betting strongly against it. Why all the hype then? True innovation, great presentation, lots of screencasts & brilliant marketing. But in the end, RoR is fighting an uphill battle. E.G. LISP has a much greater market share than Ruby (.721% vs .2%).
Programming language market share numbers are taken from this study. It covers the languages in general and is not specific to web application development. If anyone has any better analysis please let me know.
*Update*: There is a great blogpost from a Ruby on Rails devotee here that comes away with much the same conclusion but instead of just numbers he provides a well reasoned argument.
Comments
Re: Ruby on Rails
That's a good analysis. The only problem is that the underlying data is completely inaccurate, to which the website indirectly confesses. First, there's no operational definition of "market share" given. In fact, the page from which the data comes calls it "ratings" -- not market share. Secondly, you call it a "study", which implies some sort of valid sampling methods and experimental design. But, in reality, it is no study at all, it's just one websites "rating" using factors that they don't go into detail about. This is all that they say:
"The ratings are based on the world-wide availability of skilled engineers, courses and third party vendors. The popular search engines Google, MSN, and Yahoo! are used to calculate the ratings."
An example of how meaningless the numbers really are comes from their own FAQ:
" Q: What happened to Java in April 2004? Did you change your methodology?
A: No, we did not change our methodology at that time. Google changed its methodology. They performed a general sweep action to get rid of all kinds of web sites that had been pushed up. As a consequence, there was a huge drop for languages such as Java and C++. In order to minimize such fluctuations in the future, we added two more search engines (MSN and Yahoo) a few months after this incident."
The world is moving towards dynamic programming languages, so the question is really a matter of which dynamic programming language will win out. Python? Ruby? Perl 6? My bet is on Ruby.
http://www.cakephp.org
Re: Ruby on Rails
I can't trust TIOBE any more because of Foxpro's 30 upper arrows. How come? I've never heard of anyone talking about foxpro for years. Now TIOBE tells me it's even hotter than Rails (with 14 arrows)...
Re: Ruby on Rails
check http://www.west-wind.com for an active community of Fox based web developers.
you have NO IDEA how many fox based web sites there are out there. That said, we're learning Ruby.
Re: Ruby on Rails
FoxPro is hotter than rails. Just because you don't hear about it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Statistics
Hmm, according to the statistics, Ruby had a greater increase in market share than either VB.net or Python. It's unlikely to be behind Python in use for much longer, given Ruby's "killer app" of Rails.
And the drop in use of Perl is interesting. I would suspect that it has a great deal to do with its opacity in terms of understanding other people's (or your own) code. With Ruby, ease of understanding other people's work is precisely one of Ruby's greatest strengths (though it's not alone in having that quality).
Rails (and Ruby with it) is likely to grow very quickly for some of the same reasons PHP did in its early days, that it's easy to learn and easy to implement. The plethora of live apps that existed as of Rail's 1.0 release testifies to that. Rails has the added bonus of being a very, very good architecture. There's plenty of anectodal evidence that Java folks, tired of the "Slow and Clean" development patterns, are defecting in substantial numbers. I think the same can happen with folks who are sick of PHP's many, many "Quick and Dirty" implementations. Rails offers the viable possibility of easy entry into "Quick and Clean" application development.
A few points
* Perl is 5% dip is pretty dramatic. IMO this is because Perl got soundly beat by PHP for the position of dominant web-app scripting language.
* VB.net was Dead on Arrival
* Python did grow slower than Ruby in 2006 probably much due to Ruby on Rails. Python still hasn't found a home in the ecosystem of web-app environments outside of academia, Google and Zope.
* Ruby on rails did grow this year, but after all the fan fare it was only .2%. This is compared to PHP's growth of 2.15%. I.E. in 2005-2006 the year of Ruby on Rails, PHP actually grew more than 10X as much as RoR.
* Ruby on Rails's current adoption IMO warrants nothing more than an "also ran" status in the current ecosystem of web-app development environments. Until it proves other wise RoR is a pipe dream.
Pipe dream?
Here are the [[http://web.archive.org/web/20050325015321/http://www.tiobe.com/tpci.htm|stats for March 2005]], for a more detailed comparison (the wayback machine didn't have April 2005):
Ruby went from having 0.285% of the market in 3/05 to 0.493% in 4/06. Ruby market share grew by *70%* in just over a year, not .2% (.2% was the portion of the total market that it took). Ruby jumped ahead *11* positions in this time frame.
In comparision, PHP's went from 9.41% to 10.88%, an increase of 15%.
This is not to dimish PHP's growth, which is truly impressive. But Ruby's growth is impressive in its own right, and should be viewed through the lens of its own timeline. It's going to be a while before it can show the kind of absolute increases that Java and PHP can.
While it's a fun rhetorical flourish to call Ruby "a pipe dream", it misses the point of understanding why Rails is experiencing the growth that it is. The "hype" that's impressed me has not come from marketing droids. It's come from actual programmers who want good tools and don't directly benefit from their endorsement, as in Bruce Perens, Bruce Tate, et al.
You seem to look askance at RoR, and I'm wondering why. I would think that its innovations and design philosophy would lead to inspiration rather than detraction.
Big growth on a small base can be misleading
Be careful of assigning too much merit to the fact that Ruby's share grew 70%. It's easy to rack up huge percentage growth numbers when you're at the "not even a blip on the radar" size.
For example, if my software business goes from $1M in revenue to $2M that's 100% growth and seems impressive. But if my competitor is a company that grows from $500M to "only" $600M in that same timeframe, a measly 20% growth, it's a gigantic mistake to assume that somehow my company is dominating the competitive space. After all, I added $1M in the same time frame that my competitor added 10 times that much, $100M. At this stage of the game, I'm hardly overtaking them. Obviously, if enough time passes and I can keep up my 100% growth rate and they maintain only a 20% growth rate, I will eventually overtake them. But as you grow it's hard to maintain the same growth rate.
It's too early in Ruby's life to point to growth stats as proving anything especially good.
Perfect Timing
I write my $0.02 a few minutes ago, and then I find [[http://www.loudthinking.com/arc/000584.html|this]] to back me up. Talk about timing.
Looking at the indicators
I think we can probably all agree that RoR is just getting started, and that it's way too early to say that it's going to take the world by storm. But there are indicators that for me are quite interesting, and should be noted.
I'd be *very* surprised if RoR were to displace Java or PHP in the marketplace (it's an apples to oranges comparison anyways). "Enterprise" people will still want slow and clean. Legions of PHP programmers will, for reasons both legitimate and questionable, resist learning a new framework and will want to continue to do things Their Own Way rather than adopt someone else's approach wholesale. Certainly, many developers will redesign their own tools to adopt some of Rail's architecture and philosophy.
But I do predict that RoR's rapid growth is going to continue for next five years, and that within its niche, it's going to gain a very loyal following as a way to quickly build featureful and well designed database-backed web apps. The web framework market is stunningly huge now, and there is plenty of room for something like Rails to thrive while not enjoying market dominance a la PHP.
It would be interesting to compare the growth of RoR with the growth patterns of other technologies that have preceded it. PHP certainly started from humble beginnings.
I don't think Ruby / RoR is going to make it
The potential is certainly there but the odds are stacked against it. I certainly believe the framework is truly innovative, and a lot of other application environments have a lot to learn from it. But in 5 years time I expect RoR to be a notable blip in the history of web app dev. environments, not a dominant environment.
probably not, but it's nice
I have to agree that probably ror will not become mainstream.
It does have the potential for it.
I don't think the problem lies on IDE or things like that. Although a nice ide would be nice.
BTW, I have being using radrails from the day that it came out and I love it. It gets better every release.
I see the problem being the learning curve.
What ROR is really contributing is to a switch of views and methodology. ROR shook the world of web developement (thanks to great marketing from DHH) and every other framework took notice.
ROR has a lot of pluses, some great hacks and brings a lot of finesse to the table. It does come with a huge learning curve.
That's why there are so many ROR clones, there are a few for each language. My guess is that it was a sign of times, other people were working on different new ways of doing the same thing.
Diego
I personally am also a huge fan of seaside and secondarily of Django which came out about the same time with different philosophies.
Re: Ruby on Rails
Yeah, a good, non-biased breakdown. Thanks.
Re: Ruby on Rails
Great breakdown. Thanks for all the insight.