Why Rails will Reign Supreme

Ironically, one of the best places for Rails right now, lies in a place you rarely see innovation -- the big-company-internal-portal market.

Most of these sites are built on old J2EE, STRUTS, or worse ASP stacks. They've got complex configurations, and excessively convoluted deployments, both of which contribute long lead times to updates. Rails allows for a new paradigm that quite closely fits the demands of these customers. Sacrifice a bit on the scalability / reliability end, and take advantage of Rails' agility and simple deployment structure.

Because of their light traffic demands and simplistic feature sets (integrations with other internal corporate services are likely just HTTP based) corporate portals are a fantastic target for early Rails adoption. A single decent developer (the sort you can still _hire) should be able to construct and maintain a fairly complex corporate portal -- reducing development investments (whether in-house or outsourced).

It will be interesting to see which "software as a service" / "software consulting" company first adopts Rails as it's status-quo for this sort of consulting...

Rails is great, but this is just a lot of pointless, poorly written, blah blah blah. I wish I could down vote it.

Actually, reading the tea leaves, I think Merb will become a solid competitor to Rails this year and perhaps even overtake it in 18-24 months. This is all speculative, of course, but there are definitely a lot of smart people taking a very serious look at Merb because it amounts to a clean-room rewrite of Rails that preserves most of its elegance and none of the bloat. Indeed, I consider Merb's relationship with Rails to be similar to that of Rubinius's relationship to MRI.

It'll be interesting to see what happens.

Hmm, a here's why my favorite environment will dominate piece. I think the proliferation of this type of opinion piece points to something even bigger on the horizon.

There is no clear successor. There doesn't need to be. The computing ecosystem in general has grown big enough now the we don't need to, as he said, elect a new market leader. The rise of server side programming and web apps means we can choose whatever tools get us to market fastest in the domain space we've chosen. It might be rails, it might be lisp, and we might just hack it together in perl. It might be a mashup of all 3 running on different servers at different companies in different parts of the world!

"For the moment, I will address this with the following observation: at Pivotal we have many developers who know Ruby and Java and the same developers are several times more productive in Ruby. In this comparison, my money is more on Ruby compared to Python than Rails compared to Django; I can't see how we can be as productive with Python as we are with Ruby."

So they know Java and Ruby, and thus Ruby is more productive than Python?

It makes no sense.