I was quite surprised by the news that Apple is going to ship Ruby on Rails with Leopard. This is a huge step for Rails. It continues to amaze me, the rate at which Rails is gaining adoption in the mainstream.
Now I'm probably thinking too much into this, but what if Apple adopted Rails as it's primary web development architecture? I'm talking Rails is to Apple as J2EE is to IBM. I'm talking full-blown IDE with drag-n-drop and debugging. It would probably be something between RadRails and TextMate. How about a suped up Mongrel server with a pretty GUI for easy deployment?
Rails has already adopted Macs as the development platform of choice, at least for most. I've thought about buying one, just to use TextMate. There's no doubt in my mind that Rails is going to become the premier web development framework for this generation, and by adopting it, Apple would be drawing future legions of developers to it's platform.
The possible downside is that Rails would always be associated with Mac, which I think could hurt Rails' perceived legitimacy as serious framework. These are not my thoughts, but I can hear arguments already. It could possibly cause developers to think of Rails as a Toy, only to be used for playing around.
The perfect symbioses would be for Apple to create tools for Rails, but for Rails to continue as it's own entity. Kind of like the Websphere Platform and Java.
Whatever happens, due to his track record with both Rails and 37Signals, I have faith that David Heinemeier Hansson will keep it real, and continue to keep us happy.
| 1. | Chris Pietschmann | 08/08/2006 12:13:15 |
Don't you mean "Will Rails Become Apple's ASP.NET?" The .NET Framework is more than just web applications. ASP.NET is the web app piece of the .NET Framework. You can also create desktop applications with .NET.
And don't forget about Mono. The Mono project brings .NET to Mac and Linux.
| 2. | Ryan Bates | 08/08/2006 22:51:55 |
Interesting concept, but I hope nothing like this does happen. I really like the position Rails is in, and believe being adopted by any large company will change it for the worse. It is great that Apple is supporting it by including it in Leopard, but I think any further would be too far. Perhaps I'm just paranoid.
Also, Apple still has WebObjects, although I don't know how active it is.
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