Ruby on Rails in the US Market

Bravado’s VP of Engineering, Anton, discusses the prospects of Ruby on Rails in the US market.

How do you rate the popularity of Ruby on Rails for web development in the US?

Ruby on Rails is still one of the most popular web frameworks in the US (and in the world). If web frameworks were spoken languages, I think Ruby on Rails would arguably be English. It is widely adopted by development teams at companies of all sizes in the US. In fact, we built our first product at Bravado 4 years ago with Rails only. Now we rely on it as our back-end framework.

The web framework is also popular among engineering candidates. A quick search on job sites such as AngelList confirms this. Since the framework is popular all over the world, US companies looking for Ruby developers can cast their net beyond the US market. For example, Bravado has hired exceptional engineers (including those with Ruby on Rails experience) in non-US markets such as Brazil.

What advantages of using this tool would you highlight?

Its rich ecosystem and the ease of hiring it enables. Since the release of Ruby on Rails in 2004, developers around the world have assembled an extensive support system and knowledge base. A lot of typical challenges are well-known and documented on sites such as Stack Overflow or Ruby on Rails Discussions. As mentioned above, it is also relatively easy to find great engineering candidates with Ruby on Rails experience in the US and other major markets.

How promising is the future of Ruby on Rails?

Despite its continued popularity, I believe it will become a more niche product. As many things in the technology world are trending to be real-time and streaming-based, Ruby on Rails starts to become an old-school Web 2.0 framework with page loads, HTTP requests, etc. Although I don’t expect its popularity to recede in the near future, I expect there to be modern solutions that will support more real-time communication with users.

Can other programming tools hinder the development of Ruby on Rails?

Currently, I don’t think any classic web framework solutions can hinder the development of Ruby on Rails. Many amazing new frameworks such as Laravel, a PHP web framework, have been introduced. But they still trail far behind Rails, because it takes time to surpass the work invested into building and improving Rails in the past 17 years.

However, as I mentioned before, the web is changing and it is likely the introduction of modern-technology-based frameworks will alter the landscape.

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