Rails the Dog Wagging Ruby The Tail?

YARV (the blessed Ruby VM, 1 developer at a University, 3 years in development so far and garbage collection still doesn’t work,) JRuby (Ruby that runs on the JVM, 3 full time people, 2 of whom are Sun employees, and one of whom is currently writing the Ruby 1.8 spec), Ruby.Net (Ruby that runs on the .Net VM, 1 full time coder who was recently hired by Microsoft), and Rubineus (written by a frickin’ smart former sys-admin who loves Ruby, picked up the Smalltalk Blue Book and is implementing a Ruby VM & JIT in Ruby that’s almost self-compiling.)

And that’s not even counting The Garden Point Ruby .NET compiler.

For the time being, though, it is Rails that is causing most of the interest. This is a fairly easy to use (though in my opinion, it could, and should, be even easier) web development framework for Ruby. The thing that gets people interest about Rails is that it lets you create simple applications just by running a few scripts and writing some bits of pretty simple Ruby code. It gets much trickier once you start to develop real applications but you may not discover that until you are already committed.

Generally, development frameworks are little more than ‘add-ons’ to a language with the result that the language calls the shots and the framework falls in line. I think David Pollak is pretty astute in his observation that (for the moment, anyhow) this is not the case with Ruby and rails:

At the core, I think Ruby is defined by Rails. Sooner or later, the Rails guys will realize they’re the dog and start finding a tail that’s easier to wag for the customers with lots of money. That will likely lead to fractured Ruby syntax and fractured Ruby dialects.

[ Read it all ]

I say ‘for the moment’ as I am far from convinced that the dominance of Rails is assured in the long-term. It has started a trend which has already been picked up by other developers, including some who are creating rails-like frameworks for more established languages (e.g. the CodeIgniter framework for PHP). And no doubt competing frameworks for Ruby will emerge as time goes by.

Ruby and Rails may have started the trend. But in my view the future of neither is assured. Though I’m prepared to bet that something very like Ruby and Rails will emerge as a success within the next five or six years.

I admit a close interest in this. As one of the developers of Ruby In Steel – a Ruby IDE for Visual Studio – my long-term future is intimately bound up with that of Ruby. So I watch developments with keen interest…