I don’t see this as a negative, true as it might be. When Rails arrived on the scene a decade ago, it was thoroughly impressive and quite the improvement over the status quo in the PHP, Java, and even Ruby communities. At the time, despite some shortcomings, it was revolutionary.

Not surprisingly, as time went on the framework evolved, improved, and became more mature. The whole ecosystem around it grew exponentially. You can now deploy scalable Rails applications. It is the darling framework of most startups in Silicon Valley. You can leverage advanced support in editors and IDEs, run it on different platforms (e.g., on the JVM via JRuby), and find Rails developers to hire with relative ease.

As it grew to become the tool of choice of countless web developers, it managed to have a massive influence on other communities as well. It contributed to raising the bar for frameworks in other languages and as a result we have at least a bit of Rails inspired frameworks in virtually every language today. We are more productive almost regardless of the language we choose, and in many cases we have Rails to thank for it.

What Rails lost in the process is the massive competitive advantage it had in its early days over virtually everything else that was out there. [1] It hasn’t failed to grow. It hasn’t failed to innovate. It simply matured and so did the rest of the web world.

I think it’s important for developers to reinvent themselves, or at least stay up-to-date on what’s available out there. That’s how I came to discover Rails in the first place. This is true for programmers in general, and its especially true for my professional role which includes technical evangelism in a team that continually reinvents itself.

When you go talk to a new generation of programmers, you need to be able to speak their language. And today for many, in my experience, that means speaking Node.js, instead of Rails.

That’s okay. Ruby on Rails might be old news by now, but it remains a perfectly capable solution for a wide array of problems. It has become the status quo and there is nothing wrong with that.

As we look for new runtimes, languages, and frameworks that innovate further and better solve those particular use cases where Rails doesn’t shine, we might stumble upon a new and innovative solution that make today’s Rails look like J2EE or PHP did to us back in 2004. [2] Until then, it’s worth keeping an eye open while still wearing that old, comfortable, and very trusty hat that has been helping us get the job done for a decade now.

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In fact, much like I speculated at the time, Node.js ended up becoming fairly popular and is now a well established option for a full stack JavaScript development environment.

In that same essay from four years ago, I also wrote:

What we really need is a lightweight web framework that well integrates server and client-side JavaScript. This would have game changing potential (think Rails back in 2004). Developers have grown accustomed to a high level of abstraction when it comes to web development though, so there are a couple of possibilities here: either Node will become that framework or someone will create such a framework (perhaps on top of Node). Whoever does that will hold a piece of future and a golden ticket in their hands.

I believe that we have that framework today, albeit still in its early days (Preview 0.8.3 at the time of writing). That framework is Meteor (sometimes called Meteor.js). If you haven’t checked it out yet, I encourage you to do so. I see many parallels between Metor today and Rails in early 2005.

Despite what Rails haters will tell you, this is a very good thing. Success requires a healthy dose of marketing and from what I have seen, these guys know how to promote their framework. I know, I know, your allergy to marketing is flaring up, dear programmer, but it is a necessary component for the long term success and adoption of a framework.

Expanding further on that thought, I see three similarities to Rails’ early days that make Meteor likely to become very popular in the future:

1. It has the X factor. I don’t know any developer who isn’t impressed by watching the short demos on the homepage. The ability to update the content of a page that’s already loaded without refreshing is rather impressive on its own.
2. The folks behind it understand marketing. It’s already one of the top Github projects, thanks to the fact that they invited people to favorite it. You might not like it, as a developer, but this point tells me that these guys are serious about marketing their project and having it succeed. They are also fairly organized when it comes to officially sanctioned meetup groups.
3. It’s not a copycat of existing frameworks. It’s not your typical MVC Rails clone applied to language X. It introduces new and arguably simplified ways of developing applications very rapidly (take a look at the authentication screencast to see what I mean).

TL;DR: Keep an eye on Meteor. 😉

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