But now there is another complication to an eventual reemergence of ruby on rails: the competition defeated the initial comparative advantage - i.e. the simplicity - of the RoR platform. The premises that justified RoR in the past are too weak today in my opinion. The framework was sold on how easy and no-nosense it was setting it up and start prototyping your commercial solution in a time where the competitors were awkward and epitomized by J2EE, where setting up and developing the most basic application was time consuming and complicated.
Today with Spring Boot, for instance, you can bootstrap and develop your app as quickly and easily as any other cool and alternative framework but with the advantage of using a really popular and fast language.
Technologies don't die quickly and COBOL and Perl are the living proof, but it's really hard to see a bright future for RoR and ruby and I think that most of their contribution was already given.
Spring Boot has been there for ages. It changes nothing really.
Spring Boot was created solely for spinning up Microservice quickly. This is a different segment than Rails.
Spring Boot was overtaken by Golang in the microservice arena in US hi-tech scene. There's just way too may Go-based infrastructure that boosted Go ascend to the Microservice arena from 2016/2017-today. My experience might be just anecdotes but I worked for multiple companies that used to be Java based shop and they all moved away from Java/Scala to Golang and build tons of microservices (whether that strategy is the right thing to pursue or not is a different discussion altogether).
Yeah, Spring Boot might eventually decided to "tack" on the UI option (thymeleaf) but it's too late. Hi-tech already jumped to the latest fashion: Go, docker, k8s, with some sprinkle of ELK and Prometheus for monitoring.
> It's really hard to see a bright future for RoR and ruby and I think that most of their contribution was already given.
They're going to sit nicely in the corner where they belong: web-app. Nothing more, nothing less.
I'd argue the one trending down is Spring, especially after they joined VMWare and now VMWare is part of Broadcom.
Take this with a lot of grain of salt from someone who was a staunch defender of Java during the Spring (DI, MVC), DropWizards, Hibernate=>JPA2 era, skipping Ruby/Rails hype. I moved on from Java to Golang in 2018-2019 and haven't looked back despite switching multiple companies. Prior to that, I was swimming in Java world with multiple companies.
Now that I'm back in the market for my own webapp (side project, fun), I'm not going to use Golang for good reason and I'm not planning to go back to the Spring world either. Rails it is for me...
> Today with Spring Boot, for instance, you can bootstrap and develop your app as quickly and easily as any other cool and alternative framework but with the advantage of using a really popular and fast language.
Looking at the Spring Boot guides, the amount of setup, complexity and lines of code just to get an application running with MySQL doesn't support this statement: https://spring.io/guides/gs/accessing-data-mysql/
Even 20 years ago this would be easier in Rails.
Or try building the blog demo that's build on the Rails homepage video in Spring Boot.
35 minutes to build a blog with rich text (including image uploads), live comments, notification mails and tests. And after changing the database to PostgreSQL, deploy it to production.
https://rubyonrails.org/
But now there is another complication to an eventual reemergence of ruby on rails: the competition defeated the initial comparative advantage - i.e. the simplicity - of the RoR platform. The premises that justified RoR in the past are too weak today in my opinion. The framework was sold on how easy and no-nosense it was setting it up and start prototyping your commercial solution in a time where the competitors were awkward and epitomized by J2EE, where setting up and developing the most basic application was time consuming and complicated.
Today with Spring Boot, for instance, you can bootstrap and develop your app as quickly and easily as any other cool and alternative framework but with the advantage of using a really popular and fast language.
Technologies don't die quickly and COBOL and Perl are the living proof, but it's really hard to see a bright future for RoR and ruby and I think that most of their contribution was already given.