Will Ruby on Rails/Grails ever catch on in the enterprise?

Question

My question is related to "Is Ruby on Rails ready for the Enterprise?" My question is not about IF Ruby on Rails/Grails is ready for the enterprise - my question is will they ever catch on in the enterprise?

J2EE applications have such a strong foothold right now and a lot of investment from the giants (IBM, Oracle, etc) and those giants make a lot of money from building and selling J2EE applications. It's hard to imagine a world where that cash cow would get overshadowed by something else. If RoR/Grails isn't going to catch on - what will? Or will we just see a continual evolution of J2EE?

Is it worth it to learn these technologies from a career/working perspective or is it solely an academic pursuit?

Answer 1

http://www.infoq.com/presentations/archaeopteryx-bowkett (long rant on the mainstream and ruby and heath ledger)

Maybe they will catch on, hopefully they won't. Using rails provides a tremendous advantage to skilled programmers working outside of the la brea tarpit that is the enterprise world. Rails is fundamentally mismatched for the cultures of these organizations.

It is worth learning, however, if you are skilled and passionate about the craft. My personal experience with rails and other non-mainstream technologies is that I basically just have to turn work away. None of my friends who have similar skills have any difficulty finding jobs.

Answer 2

I think it is worth learning cause it introduces you to many interessting techniques/concepts that maybe be important in the near future. From my point of view...try to stay bleeding edge :-)

Answer 3

I would suggest that you look at the type of project/jobs you'd get with J2EE/Enterprise stuff and then look at the kind that come out of Rails. Which one's do you really want to spend the rest of your life working on?

Rails & Ruby have a good momentum behind them so the market should only get stronger. More importantly the move towards more expressive languages is a long term trend - hybrid languages like Scala that compile to the JVM are more Rubyesque than Javaesque and I fully expect that even if Ruby isn't the 'Next Big Thing' something like it will be. Moving into the more expressive, dynamically typed languages will make for a more interesting, dare I say fun, career path.

Answer 4

At this point, people still worrying about whether Ruby is ready for the enterprise or wondering when it will catch on are stuck about two years ago. Check out the list of sites using Ruby on Rails.

On that list is Yellow Pages (hardly a mom-and-pop operation), Hulu, Justin.tv, Twitter, Kongregate, A List Apart, Jobster, Penny Arcade, Bleacher Report, Odeo, Seeking Alpha and a ton more. Engine Yard, where I work, has 600 customers running on our platform, many of whom are quite large as well.

This idea that Rails "doesn't scale" or "isn't ready for the enterprise" is frankly a bunch of debunked nonsense that hasn't been true for at least two years, and that is becoming more and more obvious to the large sites and enterprises that have managed to use Rails and increase their productivity.

Answer 5

In terms of jobs, I don't think learning Rails will get you a job very easily. You'd be better off learning some more widely-used framework instead. That said, I do think Rails will catch on eventually. I'd argue that it's becoming pretty mainstream as-is, and it will just get more popular. Lots of fairly large websites use it already, and the list is growing. ("Enterprise" is pretty vague but I'll assume you're talking about large, mainstream web aplications.)

However, I don't think we'll see anything too complex in Rails, just "simple" web applications. I wouldn't expect to see anything like Flickr or Facebook written in Rails because of the scaling issues. Websites like Yellow Pages, although popular, don't have the same issues. The obvious exception to that is Twitter, but half of it had to be rewritten in Scala for performance.

Answer 6

For the enterprise, I think its a matter of risk of being (un)able to hire people to maintain an app years down the line. The enterprise is conservative (and sometimes for good reason) - they want to plan out human resources, and they do want to risk using a new technology if it has a chance of being superseded in the near future (where near future means 5~10 years in enterprise speak!).

Unless there is evidence that these RAD frameworks will not disappear (and for grails, there definitely is evidence it wont disappear), a conservative enterprise will not chance it.

Hence, if you are a career programmer (someone who just programs for food money and dont consider it a craft they enjoy), then dont bother learning it till you see it is being adopted. If you are a hobbiest programmer who happens to also work as a programmer by trade, then yes definitely learn it, since its fun and interesting. and who knows, it might even make you evangelize for these frameworks into the enterprise in which you work!

/2cents

Answer 7

i think yes, we can hope so!!!!!!!