From: David Heinemeier Hansson <david.heinemeier@...>
Date: 2005-06-26T07:33:11+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby on Rails

> I am evaluating Ruby on Rails for use on a project I'm working on for a small
> company. There are concerns about availability of developers to work with
> Rails if/when I leave, so I thought I'd see what other's experiences have
> been. This is a company operating out of NYC, which seems to me a great place
> to find programmers with all sorts of talents. Also, I would like to get a
> feel for how difficult it is to find hosting solutions that support RoR. My
> view of the situation is fairly one-sided, i.e. I get most of programming
> news from this and similar mailing lists, so it seems that RoR is all the
> rage. But, is this something that's true in the "real world"? Any
> advice/experience would be appreciated.

If you're free to choose an ISP, then you don't really need more than
a handful of choices. The premier one in Rails land is TextDrive
(http://www.textdrive.com), but there's a whole bunch of ISPs that
explicitly support Rails. See
http://wiki.rubyonrails.com/rails/show/CommercialSupport for more. And
of course, all ISPs that offer dedicated or colocated machines
"support" Rails (in the sense that you can do whatever you like).

There's quite a blooming job market for Rails. See
http://weblog.rubyonrails.com/archives/category/jobs/ for some of the
previous positions that other companies have tried to fill. And all
I've heard back has been success stories with companies finding Rails
talent. I'm sure you can find Railers in NYC too. We have some 1400+
programmers on the mailing list and often some ~240 people on IRC.

Loads of new people coming to every day as well. O'Reilly is reporting
that Curt Hibbs' excellent tutorials are extremely well visited (no
doubt with help from all the Slashdotting), we've got more than 2,000
beta books sold of Agile Web Development with Rails, and the Rails
tutorial at OSCON is the 3rd most popular at the entire conference. So
that's at least a good handful of indicators that there's a huge
interest from developers and that they're educating themselves as
well.

And I don't really see that slowing down any time soon. We got 6 books
announced, the big 1.0 release coming up shortly, and I'm touring a
good number of conferences in the coming months to raise awareness
even further.

So. No, Ruby on Rails is not Java/Struts or PHP with hundreds of
thousands of programmers trained. But companies usually just need a
few, so a pool of a few thousand will usually do. And the fact that
there already exists a booming ecosystem around Rails with companies
hiring, publishers printing, and excitement being voiced all over the
place should tell a convincing story to any concerned business owner.

Good luck with your project.
--
David Heinemeier Hansson
http://www.loudthinking.com -- Broadcasting Brain
http://www.basecamphq.com   -- Online project management
http://www.backpackit.com   -- Personal information manager
http://www.rubyonrails.com  -- Web-application framework