Cedric has an interesting article about Why Ruby on Rails Won’t Become Mainstresm. It’s a good, thought-provoking article if you’re interested in the business case for Ruby on Rails. But while I pretty much agree with what Cedric said, I take issue on several points:

Like David Heinemeier Hansson, I question whether we even should expect Rails to become mainstream. To this point, I think that Cedric’s basic assumptions are wrong – Ruby on Rails is a tool for building web applications, not a “be-all end-all” programming language that solves every conceivable problem. It wasn’t intended to be and it never will be. Like Jakob Skjerning points out so well in Ruby, Rails, and the mainstream, Rails is a very specialized tool. Here at Art of Mission, the majority of websites that we do are still done in PHP or plain-old HTML, because that’s usually the best tool for the job. Specialized apps like CrossConnector and Mission Tools require more sophisticated tools, so we use the tools that we have at our disposal – Ruby on Rails. If nobody else in the world picks up on Rails, I’m ok with that, because I’ve got some really awesome and distinctive tools here. Rails is distinctive, mainstream is not. As one commentator said on David’s article “Mainstream solutions are developed for the least common denominator”.

I think that a lot of the criticism of Rails comes from an innate reaction to what is perceived as “Rails Hype”. I won’t talk about whether or not I think Rails is over-hyped, except to say that David Heinemeier Hansson and the crew over at 37signals are great marketers, and the Rails community is extremely excited about what they do. My response to the perceived hype is an emphatic who cares! Hype or no hype, Rails is not going to hurt you. Again, Rails is a tool, and a good one at that. You either use it or you don’t, your choice. I use it.

If you’re interested in the business case for Ruby on Rails, I can speak from experience that Rails can indeed reduce your time-to-market for a web application product. We started working on CrossConnector less than a year ago, and just released Version 1.0 last week. That’s with one programmer, and with splitting our time between CrossConnector and client work. I sincerely doubt that we would have been able to accomplish this with PHP, ASP.NET, Java, or any other “mainstream” programming language.

Further Reading

• Otaku, Cedric’s weblog
• Mentalized
• Loud Thinking