A colleague of mine recently predicted that Ruby would overtake PHP in the next 2 years. Another colleague recently commented on the way Java is trying to makeover its midlife crisis “Java 5 is not innovation; it is contact lenses and a toupee. ”
One thing I know is that Java will not always be the language of choice for serious web development. Anyone who says otherwise needs to just remember five letters: C.O.B.O.L. My guess is that this transition could take place as quickly as three years from now. Will Ruby replace it? Well, with Rails it has a shot. Its such an easy environment that it could potentially take on Java.
I believe Java’s community is why it has had enormous growth over the last ten years - it grew a base of people very quickly that contributed a large amount of free code that could easily (I’m stretching a bit here) be included in a project. Ruby seems to have the same thing going for it. There is a friendly community that is growing very rapidly, with an ever expanding set of libraries.
Then again, with the velocity that Java had in the beginning, I would not be suprised that some other language currently being dreamed up somewhere could hit the sweet spot of expression and APIs, along with that killer app that pushes it over the edge (servlets for Java), making it the “New Thing”. We’ll see soon enough.
Jeff | 26-Sep-05 at 7:49 am | Permalink
Java appealed to C programmers because Java alleviated some of the more complex aspects of C it had a nearly identical syntax. In short, Java was easier than C but still C-like.
My money is on Groovy because it incorporates many of the positives of Ruby but maintains a Java-esque flavor. Ruby, however, is definately the front-runner and it will be a challenge to overcome its momentum.
Stephen | 27-Sep-05 at 12:31 am | Permalink
I hope Rails will kill off PHP as soon as possible. However, it has to overcome PHP’s huge install base (especially mod_php being everywhere, but mod_fastcgi being, relatively, nowhere).
Granted, some people are always going to want the “simplicity” of spaghetti-code PHP.
But, against Java, my impression is that as a scripting language (technology- but more business-wise), Ruby is going to stay at the Perl/Python adoption level. Used by technies for pet projects, but not accepted for “important” projects by IT managers.
Qualification: unless a company like IBM/Sun/Microsoft gets behind Ruby and starts supporting/pushing it.