Computerworld: The Top Five Technologies You Need to Know About in '07 Mar 01
21 comments Latest by Terinea Tech Tips
Computerworld’s list includes Advanced CPU architectures, Hosted hardware, Ultra-Wideband, NAND drives, and Ruby on Rails. I don’t know if the list is in order, but Rails is listed as #1.
Equal parts design philosophy and development environment, Rails offers developers a few key code-level advantages when constructing database-backed Web applications… Released in 2004, RoR is an open-source project that originally served as the foundation of a project management tool designed by Web development company 37signals LLC. It is easily ported among Linux, Windows and Macintosh environments, and it can have a dramatic impact on the speed at which a Web development team is able to build and maintain enterprise Web sites and applications.
They also go on to list a few notable apps based on Rails and note that Rails will be shipped with OS X 10.5 Leopard.



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21 comments so far
John 01 Mar 07
‘give me a break. Ruby on Rails in the top 5? Let’s get real.
Robby Russell 01 Mar 07
This is good news for the Rails community… yes… things are still going strong! :-)
DjD 02 Mar 07
Congrats Guys!
Scott Meade 02 Mar 07
John and other detractors – the author of this article is talking about technologies that have real impact right now and will continue to have real impact in 2007. This list is seeking emerging technologies that not only talk about “changing things” but actually will or will continue to change the industry. Mature technologies are out. Technologies with no real-life impact in 2007 are out. As the author said: “we paid special attention to how soon these advances will be available to everyday users.” Rails is an emerging technology that is available today. Rails has already changed the way developers work and the way they talk about the industry. Rails will grow faster in production deployments and technological advances in 2007 than in 04, 05, or 06. Fits the criteria for the author’s list perfectly, I think.
Those that don’t think so are going to get left behind, IMHO , and find themselves wishing they were Rails veterans but will never be able to. You can’t go back in time and become one of the earliest users of Rails, so why not jump on now and change the way you work forever? When Java got mainstream acceptance everyone tried to say they’ve been working in Java for ten years, when the language hadn’t even been around that long. I predict we’ll see the same with Rails five and ten years from now, IMHO . (I hate to sound like such a fanboy – so to temper my comments let me assure you that I also do post comments contrary to 37s on svn :) )
Lance 02 Mar 07
fanboy… just kidding… I’m reading Ruby For Rails currently, and I’m finding it quite interesting as my background is Java and Perl.
Mark 02 Mar 07
No offense to RoR, but that list is lame. Most technologists having little to gain by focusing on anything in that list.
Ryan Bergeman 02 Mar 07
How’s that for a feather in your cap? :) Nice job!
Benoit 02 Mar 07
Good news about Rails. I would like to present Rails in my company as an alternative to PHP , does anyone have good documents about performance and scability about Rails?
Thanks. Benoit
Unomi 02 Mar 07
Rails is just a framework, so it should work for any language. Ruby is not that popular in comparison to other languages. It is on the rise because of Rails, but what are the advantages of the language itself? What offers Ruby better, easier or otherwise different than the popular scripting languages?
I mean, it’s great to have a solid framework to work with, don’t invent the wheel twice etc. But to understand the popularity of the language, one should first discover why Ruby is better.
Other people are saying Turbogears (Python) is the future. But it depends on why the language is a better argument than the framework. It is a principality issue, not a popularity issue.
- Unomi -
John Topley 02 Mar 07
Actually a lot of the power of Rails comes from the fact that it’s written using Ruby and does things that you simply can’t do in other languages. For example, how would you implement ActiveRecord’s dynamic finders in Java?
Anonymous Coward 02 Mar 07
That one is pretty easy.
Something like this in Rails: p = Person.find_by_username_and_password user, pass becomes this in Java: DynamicFinderFactory factory = new DynamicFinderFactoryImpl(Person.class); DynamicFinderCriteria criteria = new POJOFinderCriteria(); criteria.addField(new CriteriaField("username")); criteria.addField(new CriteriaField("password")); criteria.addOperator(new AndCriteriaOperator()); DynamicFinder finder = factory.createDynamicFinder(criteria); List<Person> found = finder.findInstancesByCriteria(); Person p = found.get(0);But the advantage in the Java version is, it’s fully pluggable implementation with POJOs, EJBs, etc. behind a set of interfaces. You could even use some annotations to remove the verbose CriteriaField construction.
John Topley 02 Mar 07
I think you just made my point for me!
三洋伺服 02 Mar 07
Good news about Rails. I would like to present Rails in my company as an alternative to PHP
Erik 02 Mar 07
Am I the only one who can’t get that damn site to show up? Either in FF or IE 7 .
That’s one of the must blood-boiling online experiences I’ve had in the past year.
Rod 02 Mar 07
Shun the non-believers…. Charlie we’re going to the candy mountain…..
andrew 02 Mar 07
@Benoit: Jason Hoffman at Joyent has published a few papers on scaling and performance. Naturally I can’t actually find any right now :-( But this weblog entry might be a place to start: http://joyeur.com/2007/02/04/a-brief-update-with-some-numbers-for-hardware-load-balanced-mongrels
Benoit 02 Mar 07
@andrew: thanks, it’s an interesting article.
Mashup 02 Mar 07
Mashups are missing in the list!
Anonymous Coward 03 Mar 07
Mashups are overrated.
Kula bácsi 05 Mar 07
RoR is overhyped.
Terinea Tech Tips 05 Mar 07
On a similar note… 6 Things Your Business Should be Doing in 2007 (IT Wise)
I agree that Mashup’s are missing but will businesses see them just as fancy web site?
Comments are closed