Last month I attended a seminar about Virtual Worlds and in particular Second Life, during which it was suggested that Second Life had been through the hype stage, passed over the bell curve of growth and the “cool” factor, and was now on the other side of the curve with as many articles in the press concerning problems and issues than there were previously praising it.
Is the same happening with Rails?
For the last couple of years there has been a great deal written and tried with Rails which has been overwhelmingly positive (and in the main rightly so). However, I am detecting a swing in the coverage, and in particular the recent blog from cdbaby.com describing why a Rails re-write of a PHP system was completely abandoned, details here.
There have been a number of successes at Shine using Rails, and it is a great technology, but is it really that good a fit in the enterprise beyond new greenfield systems? Is there compelling reasons to replace the (in the main) Java systems we have built and maintained over the last 10 years? Is GWT a better solution for existing corporate systems – even just from the point of view that the retraining involved in GWT is trivial for a Java developer as GWT development is all written in Java? Or will improvements in Rails, for instance JRuby, allow greater integration into existing systems and hence speed its adoption?
So back to the original point, where on the bell curve is Rails….