Emerging Trends in Ruby on Rails Development in 2012
Ruby on Rails has emerged as one of the hottest technologies for quite a few years now. Going on eight years, Ruby on Rails is quickly moving into new arenas: major applications in everything from e-commerce to productivity to content, to name a few. Although the growth of Ruby on Rails has become a debatable topic among the experts, we can't deny the fact that demand for these skills have picked up significantly and still seeing the most growth in jobs of any language out there.
So in this post, I asked a few Ruby on Rails developers and experts to share their trend predictions in Ruby on Rails development in 2012.
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Below are their answers to the question: What do you foresee in Ruby on Rails in 2012?
Gautam Rege, Co-founder and Managing Director of Josh Software Pvt. Ltd., an offshore software development company providing cost effective, state of the art Rails Development:
"Rails in 2012 is only going to get more popular! I believe that Rails is going to start getting acceptance as an Enterprise Web Development Platform from 2012 - thats a huge step forward. Once the BFSI sector embraces Rails whole heartedly, Rails will be topping technology charts!
Ruby has already been touted as the "Language of the cloud", Rails is probably the forerunner for all web application development. Rails 3.x was a big move forward and Rails 3.2, which is in RC.2 as I write this, is ensuring that all aspects of the framework are leaner, meaner and faster.
With the heavy use of WebSockets, things are looking very bright for next generation Rapid Web Applications. It is already recommended that a web-server should spew out only JSON data (no HTML) and the pages should be rendered using Javascript i.e. browser powered web apps! Rails is ideally suited for such applications!"
Noah Gibbs, Software Engineer of Ooyala, an online video platform that offers the most advanced technology for video publishing, video analytics, and video monetization:
"One big thing is that you'll see far more MVC moving into the (JavaScript) client. Rails is going to quickly start growing much more support for rich client apps. This is partly because Yehuda Katz, the author of Merb and a member of the Rails core team, is currently working on Ember.js. He's specifically looking to build more support for rich client apps into Rails, and has said so at conferences.
Yes, enterprises will continue adopting Rails. I don't think it'll be a huge wildfire change - I think it will continue to be faster incremental adoption, as it has been. But many of the small startups using Rails will get bigger, which will also drive that perception.
Rails assets (think CoffeeScript, Sprockets, LessCSS, etc) are going to get more powerful. It's clear that the core team isn't 100% happy with the current implementation (nor should they be). That means likely API changes, and probably easier expandability - currently assets are kind of fragile and very poorly documented.
As far as who is using Rails and for what - that won't change hugely. Hackers still love it, and will for awhile yet (but not forever). You'll see more frameworks like Lift continue to draw off the avant garde hackers, and you'll see Rails grow a few features inspired by those frameworks. If Rails is very unlucky, this is the year somebody will finally write a new web framework with one or more really compelling features that Rails can't mimic - Lift almost did it with server push, but not quite. If a framework can be reasonable to program for but still reorder the page calculations to work in parallel based on the view, for instance, that's going to be a serious blow to Rails -- Rails can't really adapt to do that, despite some good hacks for lazy database loading that happened in 3.1.
On the plus side, if a framework with some of those "Rails killer" features happened this year, it would still take 2-3 years to get popular enough to make a dent in Rails' popularity, and that's if it grew really quickly.
Maybe this year, maybe in 2-3 years, we'll also start seeing a lot more articles pop up about pruning and maintaining legacy Rails apps as you start seeing older Rails apps being inherited by new maintainers as a startup gets bought out."
Wilfrido Nuqui, Senior Ruby on Rails Developer here at Exist Global, a world-class software engineering firm that provides Java, Ruby on Rails, Open Source, and technology expertise to Fortune 500 companies:
"Ruby on Rails will remain king of web apps among startups and will still be a popular choice for web development for years. Yet as Ruby on Rails is becoming more efficient (with the speed boost and improved security) through its latest implementations, we can expect a significant increase on the adoption rate of Rails among enterprises.
Ruby will be big in cloud applications. This is evident already as companies like Heroku, Engine Yard and Morphlabs are utilizing Ruby at its fullest to glue their cloud platform.
We will be seeing more unusual use of Ruby as language programmers will continue to implement other languages in Ruby mainly because of ease of implementation or just an experiment.
Although "major refactoring in Ruby" was already done, we can still expect some minor refactoring. And as Ruby creator, "Matz" is currently working on an alternative subset or dialect of Ruby for the small devices, there might be a bright future for Ruby on Rails in the area of mobile app development."
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