Is It worth learning Ruby On Rails

Question

Is Ruby On Rails a growing Framework, or will it die in the next few years? Is it worth committing your project to it now?

Answer 1

I think a better question is does Ruby on Rails meet your needs? Will it be a good fit for your need? Is there a different tool that will meet your needs better?

Answer 2

We have a vibrant user community for Ruby on Rails and Ruby in general. I don't see any sign of it going away anytime soon. Still, I think @Alex B's point is valid: choose your framework on what works best for you, though that may include its long-term viability.

As for whether it's worth learning, I think Ruby and RoR are worth exploring if you don't have any experience with dynamic languages regardless of whether you ever intend to use it in a production application. I work in C#/.NET primarily and have learned a lot that I've been able to apply there from exploring RoR.

Answer 3

Every piece of technology inevitably dies some day, and Ruby on Rails is no exception.

FORTRAN was the de facto standard back in the 60s and 70s but it practically died a long time ago. The same thing will probably happen to C, C++ and of course, Ruby.

That being said, Rails is a pretty solid framework, and I think it's one of the best web frameworks out there. If you're a web developer, you should definitely look into it.

EDIT:

I believe some clarification is necessary regarding FORTRAN's "death."

When I say that FORTRAN is practically dead, I say that in comparison to FORTRAN's prime (the 60s & 70s). FORTRAN is, as far as I'm aware, no longer being taught in schools or used in new projects.

On a side note, this (when is a language/technology "dead?") would be a really interesting topic to discuss, but I'm not sure SO is the right place for it.

Answer 4

I say yes, but my opinion is biased as I've been trying to learn Ruby on Rails myself. I think the framework is great; it has its flaws (mostly related to how quickly the community changes things, and all of its "magic") but overall I think that it's the "next big thing" as far as web development goes.

Answer 5

Ruby on Rails usage has settled to normal. It was overhyped at first, and then overcriticized.

It does what it does nicely, and it is worth checking out the basics, if for no other reason, then to see that web app development doesn't have to be painfull.

Answer 6

When you're going to learn RoR, you can move to JRuby or Groovy/Grails and take profit of the immense impact of the Java/J2EE world.

Ruby is a language with a very high productivity, expressive and easy to read language without much code boilerplate.

But Ruby is a very slow language! The JVM implementation JRuby is a lot faster.

Maybe RoR will die (I think it won't), but the Java platform might life a bit longer. So you protect your investment, because you can reuse any JRuby class with other Java Classes. Nearly every Ruby software can be started on Glassfish with JRuby ;)

Answer 7

Go ahead and learn Ruby on Rails or at least do one of the better tutorials.

Some of the ideas/tricks like convention over configuration are useful to understand in any later work that you do.

Ruby runs a bit slow compared to some other options out there but is certainly fast enough for most internal websites that will not get a lot of traffic.

Answer 8

Depends on where you work if I read the situation correctly.

If you're in a large company, like a Fortune 500 firm in the US, it's unlikely that Ruby or Rails will do you much good. Less for technical reasons, more due to the fact that those organizations tend to be large, bureaucratic, conservative, lowest common denominator, and risk-averse. You'll see Java or C# entrenched there, because they're mainstream languages with large user communities and firms backing them up.

If you're in a small company that's more entrepreneurial I can see where it's more likely that they're taking a chance on a technology like Ruby, Python, etc. A place that agrees with Paul Graham is more likely to use an alternative platform.