Why Ruby on Rails is so Popular

Do you know why Ruby on Rails is so popular?

Ruby on Rails took root in Silicon Valley because it enabled rapid development of websites and apps.

Ruby is supposedly the next generation programming language, and it was built around a single, unified framework, Rails.

Ruby makes it easier in some regards because it has a single, known platform. If you want to build something in PHP, you have to get the developers to pick one of the three or four major frameworks like Zend.

You don't know how many there are?

I said major, and how many major ones like Zend or CodeIgniter exist is its own debate thread on StackOverflow.

Ruby on Rails is not always a gem.

Gems are the plug-ins that let you add functionality.

I know that. But I meant, Twitter and Groupon had to migrate off of Ruby on Rails when they hit a certain size.

Ruby on Rails was good enough for them until they got huge, versus something like Lua that does not work for more than an Adobe Flash game.

I read that Ruby on Rails had a bug that lets someone execute code remotely on the server hosting it.

How often do they find bugs like that in Java or Javascript? In fact, the open architecture in Java means fixing one bug often causes another.

Ruby on Rails is hard to learn.

Once you do learn it, you can whip out apps or websites as fast as you could work in HTML. And you can add new functions via Gems far faster than you could coding something in PHP.

There are fewer online resources for help.

Imagine being able to say we used the same online Gems, AKA code modules, to add functionality to our site that is being used by this other groovy site in Silicon Valley.

Groovy is a rival language to Java.

And imagine being able to say you built a mobile-ready website and there is not a bit of Java in it. Well, except any coffee you spilled on the keyboard working late one night.