I keep seeing this posts about ruby on rails and it sounds more and more like it's suppose to be the holy grail of web programming. Yet, I don't see many success story's to back it up. Is it going to be a ruby bubble happening soon ? How many projects for YC use Ruby ?
I think everyone else has pretty much summed it up.<p>My answer is: No, but it is closer than anything else. It is a huge stepping stone towards a truly powerful web applications framework.<p>Rails won't stop innovating any time soon. There's an absolutely enormous amount of innovation going on in Rails plugins / RubyGems. Eventually the different plugin/gem approaches to common problems will become standardized, and those standardized approaches will make it to Rails core.<p>Once Rails core has all of these awesome things standardized (multi-stage deployment, more "ruby-like" templates (ERB replacement), fixtures replacement, automatic generation of integration tests, better caching, etc), it will become both great and a bloated piece of crap.<p>Then, another platform emerges that does to Rails what Rails did to PHP. It will take all of the features of Rails+Bloat, and put it in a sexy package. Then, THAT will be the holy grail.<p>At least until the cycle happens again.
There are a few success stories out there using Rails, starting with, of course 37Signals themselves, and Twitter. Rails has gotten a lot of publicity and there are more than a few Ruby fans out there. <p>I would not call it a holy grail. There has been the growth of several frameworks that use the Rails philosophy recently like Grails and hopefully we will see a few success stories come out of those too.
It's a very intelligently-designed framework built on top of a very expressive (even fun) language. <p>But some web apps are too trivial to justify the overhead, and some may be too vast to want to run in a somewhat pokey interpreted language. <p>But for something of the size and complexity in the range of Basecamp or (one of my favorites) Snacksby, you'd be stupid not to use it (or a similarly-capable framework). <p>Another seriously cool framework is Seaside, but so far I haven't gotten my hands dirty with coding, just played around with the seriously amazing dabble DB. It's not very "web like", but it can do stuff that makes my head hurt when thinking of programming it even on top of Rails.
It's important to remember that Ruby and Rails are not the same thing. <p>Ruby has a lot of very nice features, but a slow-ish runtime (JRuby & IronRuby might be a different matter). As for a Ruby bubble (as opposed to a Rails bubble), I doubt it as there is now quite a community (and a loyal following of prag devs) around the language itself.<p>Rails is one of many interesting frameworks getting around these days (another worth a look is Python based Django). As the framework matures the hype bubble will burst, but Rails has some way to go before obscurity.
It's a big step on the path forward, even if you only judge by how many people are copying it.<p>It gets a lot of things right, in my opinion. It had to - no one would even consider jumping to a new platform for a %10 increase, so it must be significant.
I do not think it's the holy grail. At the same time, I wouldn't count success stories to gauge its usefulness. There are many factors going into success, and the programming language you choose is just one of them.