State of Ruby on Rails Community and Framework

Question

As an exercise I have spent the past 2 months learning Ruby on Rails. In learning RoR I relied heavily upon Agile Development with Rails. This book was an invaluable resource. From a learning perspective the 37Signals sponsored site Learn All About Ruby on Rails was also a great jumping off point.

The issues that I ran into that were not covered by the above resources ended up as my RoR questions on Stack Overflow. In attempting to self help before posting many of those questions I would find little or no documentation. What documentation I did find came in the form of blog posts circa 2006. I have no issues with using blog posts as a resource but am concerned that seemingly little documentation is still being generated by the community.

That said it does seem like plenty of RoR development continues. It is actively being taught at Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley and company's like Pivotal Labs are still huge proponents of the framework. That said, I do find it disconcerting that a post from 2006 listing 6 job sites for Rails programmers was consolidated in 2009.

What I am driving at is:

• Has the RoR community begun to dry up?
• Have people moved onto other frameworks and abandoned RoR?
• Is the state of the framework such that not a lot of new things are occurring limiting the amount/need for discussion?
• Am I looking in all the wrong places and jumping to conclusions?

My intention is not to incite a flame war but begin an honest and unbiased dialog to better understand where RoR stands as a framework and the current state of its community.

Answer 1

I think it is really hard to answer questions like "Has the RoR community begun to dry up?" or "Have people moved onto other frameworks and abandoned RoR?". To answer this you would have to do some great research (which I don't think have been done or will ever be). the community continues to grow, show us new ideas and features and the most important it continues to influence all other languages and programmers!!

Regarding the state of the framework I think that it is inevitable that the pace of new features became slower, since as more people uses the framework the more difficulty you have to make the changes, because there will be a time where you can't just break compatibility and it will be a lot hard to implement new features. This is like the destiny of the languages which are on the way to become mainstream languages, just look at Java and how difficult and how long it is to make changes.

Answer 2

Analyzing Stack Overflow tag counts: Rails doing quite well here

This is indirect evidence, but I believe the Tiobe index showed Ruby rapidly gaining ground following the explosion of Rails on the scene and then maintaining a flat position at the bottom of the top ten. That would weakly indicate that Rails is established and is growing at the same rate as the other frameworks. Eventually, Ruby will probably be ahead of VB, at least.

My unscientific personal perception is that Rails questions are more common than ever on SO. There are considerably more Rails questions on SO than Ruby, 7072 vs 5630, and the real disparity is much higher because my perception is that most Rails questions also have a ruby tag.

That's more rails tags than django (3628), and the other Python web frameworks are in mere double-digits. The popular PHP frameworks have 3-digit numbers here, about 1,000 for zend, and probably all together add up to more than Rails, but if Rails approximately equals PHP-frameworks then I would say, wow.

Finally, Rails has something that can take you a long way in the digital racket: respect from the gurus. (Ruby has this as well.) There are PHP and ASP technologies that are more-or-less admitted "clones of Rails". That sort of recognition is not something popularity can ever get you and I think it will continue to give Rails a solid base of support.

Answer 3

The problem is not that the community has dried up. It's more that the up-to-date Rails information is sparse compared to the numerous postings made when Rails wast he Next big thing.

That's starting to change, but your search results will vary greatly depending on the language you use. A lot of key terms and concepts were renamed between Rails 1.2 and 2.0. So if you're using vague terms to describe what you're looking for you'll probably end up with holdovers from Rails 1.2.

Really the best place to get your Rails documentation is official api documents. After working your way through a couple of tutorials (even out of date ones,) you should understand enough about the rails architecture to know where to look in the API docs for what you need. The only problem is the API docs don't make it explicitly clear when features were introduced. So you might run into problems if you haven't updated the Rails gem in 6 months.

On the community side of things. There are a still few blogs that consistently post about new Rails techniques, or update the old stuff. Ryan Bates' Railscasts and Ryan Daigles' What's new in Edge Rails are two great resources for up to date Rails posts. Between the API docs, those two blogs, and the out of date book I bought when I was starting out, I've had no problem learning how to design effectively with Rails.

Answer 4

If you're learning Rails to land a job doing Rails full time (since you cite job boards), I think it is really dependent on location. Using craigslist as a general gauge it seems there are quite a few Rails jobs in the bay area while in my market there aren't a lot of Rails gigs.

I also came to Rails from a .net background. Here are a few more resources that you might find useful - Railscasts, Rails Guides and while Agile Web Development with Rails is good, there are other good Ruby/Rails books.

Being that SO is generally MS oriented, the fact that the ruby-on-rails tag count is almost as high as the asp.net-mvc tag says to me that Rails isn't dying.

Answer 5

I think that your perceived difficulty in finding answers to Rails questions online, and mostly finding obsolete answers in blog posts, reflects the maturing of the Rails platform, and in particular the documentation. The 3rd edition of Agile Development with Rails is quite good, covering Rails 2, and there are a ton of other books. And as others have pointed out, there are other good "official" documentation sources. I particularly like the Rails Guides, which are generally better written for a first exposure to the topics they cover than the API docs, which are great reference, but often assume you have some familiarity.

I have also found that the documentation for most Ruby gems for Rails has improved tremendously. I think this is mostly due to GitHub, which makes adding good a README pretty much mandatory, and extensive wiki pages are easy to do, and encouraged by the community.

As others have pointed out, Googling for answers can be an art, and Google isn't perfect. When you can start your search for answers with a known-good resource, like the Rails Guides, or RailsCasts, or the official gem documentation, or the blog of the tool developer, etc., you will have much better results than when you just start typing terms into Google.

Answer 6

In short: you are jumping to conclusions.

I will not repeat the other (and very valid) arguments people have mentioned here before (SO, google, books, ...)

I see the community is still growing, plugins are still actively being developed, and Ruby on Rails is moving to the enterprise. I think this is a good thing.

Let me refer you to a more scientific whitepaper concerning the eco-system of Ruby on Rails.

In short, if you see that currently the best Ruby VM is JRuby, sponsored by Sun. That Mac is working on a very efficient Ruby VM, that even Microsoft are preparing their IronRuby (also very efficient) for release (and open source!). This way Ruby on Rails applications can integrate with all possible legacy code natively, be it java/.net. There is no stopping us now :)

All that aside: Ruby and Ruby on Rails are great platforms to work with, the group of developers becoming aware and convinced of this are growing, and with all this backing there are no excuses not to use it at work too :)