GoDaddy.com Supports Ruby
May 1, 2006
I have had two major problems with Ruby and Ruby on Rails:
- Hard to find Ruby/Rails hosting.
- Not too many clients looking for Ruby programmers.
One thing has changed:
A major hosting company (GoDaddy.com,) has stepped up and now supports Ruby on Rails hosting – there goes my first argument against learning Ruby!
Quote from GoDaddy:
“Our customers are finding Ruby on Rails to be incredibly valuable in shaping their online presence,” said Bob Parsons, GoDaddy.com CEO and Founder. “We are pleased to be able to offer support for a framework that increases the utility of the sites we host.”
With GoDaddy.com jumping in, this will force/influence other hosting companies to adopt Ruby and as such, I believe over the next year, Ruby hosting will become more and more common.
BUT EVERYTHING IS NOT PERFECT WITH RUBY… YET.
Even though it looks as though the hosting thing is resolving itself, we still have the issue of the number of Ruby gigs/jobs floating around … not that many yet.
There is still so much PHP out there (hosting, frameworks, products) that I think for next few years, PHP will continue to dominate with regards to small to medium size projects.
That said, I think that Ruby will be a player for a few reasons … most important, is the strong acceptance of Ruby (and Rails) by the Java community.
Another problem with Ruby and Rails, is the stability of the fastcgi plug-in that works with Apache 2.x.
Basically, there are still some lingering issues with how Ruby ‘talks’ to Apache. This is major, but there are many high profile, high traffic websites that seem to be running fine anyway … ?
CONCLUSION
Despite the aforementioned issues with Ruby and Rails, I am actually involved with putting together a major project with Rails … I know, I know, I’m a bit of a hypocrite!
My reasons?
- Ruby and Rails are compelling – there’s some good stuff in there that should make the project much easier to build.
- I wanted to explore Ruby and Rails with a real project – I’m just a ‘Curious George’ I suppose …
I plan to come back to you and give you my impressions as to how easy (and useful) it would be for web designers (not programmers) to learn at Ruby vs. say PHP.
Stefan
