Last night's Perl Monger's meeting was fantastic. I stopped counting attendees at about 50. We usually have a good crowd, but this was astonishing. The reason? A Ruby On Rails presentation. The regular leader, Josh Heumann, was absent as it was his girlfriend's birthday, so I ran the show. Rather than the usual task of having everyone introduce themselves -- we would have been there all night -- I asked for a show of hands from the Rubyists. Many hands shot skyward. I then asked for a show of hands from the Mongers. Many hands shot skyward. However, we were outnumbered by the Ruby folk. I couldn't believe it. We probably had more Ruby programmers present than there were Ruby jobs available in the entire city.
It's my understanding that the local Ruby groups usually only have about three or four people showing up at their meetings, but I think last night was exceptional because of all of the buzz surrounding Rails. In fact, two of the people there were employed as full time Rails developers -- in different shops.
What? You're not familiar with Ruby on Rails? In less than a year (it was released in July 2004), it has become one of the most hyped Web application frameworks available, and for good reason. This is Ruby's killer app and, I humbly predict, if anything gives Ruby serious traction in programming circles, Rails is it. Heck, it's already doing it. A number of the Rubyists said they had just started Ruby because of Rails. From what we saw last night, I don't blame them. It only took a couple of minutes to develop a basic CRUD app. A few minutes later (with some stumbling), it was converted to an AJAX application. A couple of minutes later, the SOAP WSDL interface was up and running. It doesn't matter what the suits think of Java (or Perl, for that matter), when they see the speed of development here, they're going to sit up and pay attention. Ruby has really arrived.
Re:Have you looked at Catalyst, Ovid?
Ovid on 2005-04-14T22:45:44
I'd be happy to if you can find me some tuits
:) Re:Have you looked at Catalyst, Ovid?
sri on 2005-04-15T01:08:57
Most people start out with this.
Or just join me and the dudes in #catalyst (irc.perl.org), we'll get you started...;)
btw. it's a very good time now, since we'll release Cat5 during the next days!
We probably had more Ruby programmers present than there were Ruby jobs available in the entire city.
You probably had more Ruby people than there were Ruby jobs available on the planet
Unfortunately. Really like the language.
Re:
sri on 2005-04-15T08:41:02
Not really, but Ruby's reflection support is very sweet, which makes frameworks like Rails much easier.
It's popularity also benefits much from implicit invocants and stuff like that.Re:
Aristotle on 2005-04-15T09:08:19
So basically it’s saying “hurry up with Perl6 if you want a piece of the pie, guys?“Re:
sri on 2005-04-15T10:34:20
We managed to bypass most of Perl5's limitations for Catalyst, so it's already fun to use.
But Perl6 would definately solve most (maybe all) of our problems, but it's not just Perl6, Cat is quite useless without mod_perl and modules like TT2 and (C)DBI...
So i guess it will take some time to get Perl6 in the game...
This is Ruby's killer app and, I humbly predict, if anything gives Ruby serious traction in programming circles, Rails is it.
There's also a slightly less well known app that's pushing Ruby into industry - and that's WATIR - a really nice Ruby testing framework for driving IE on windows boxes.
WATIR has been the tipping point for many people I've come across, especially testers, to start playing with the language. And once it's in the acceptance test it quickly migrates into the rest of the organisation. There's going to be a Pragmatic Bookshelf book on testing with Ruby too which will help I'm sure.
