What is the future of Ruby on Rails developer ?

What is the future of Ruby on Rails developer ?

 

Here are the list of answers I came across in social networking sites. 

 

Andrew McElroy • I think JavaScript is going to be the new 'rockstar'. I can forsee a rails 4.3 or 5.0 version which essentially compiles all the ruby code down to javascript and in essence eats nodeJS' lunch. It is already possible to execute javascript in ruby context. Also, it is possible though a different library to go the other direction. Clearly, Javascript is seeing a lot of attention these days. One more prediction, CoffeeScript doesn't so much go away as become merged into a future ECMAScript.
It's worth pointing out that with the inclusion of the asset pipeline in rails 3.1, you must now have a Javascript Runtime engine on the server side. Currently therubyracer gem seems to be the most popular. I think this dependency is a pretty telling future indicator.

One thing is for certain, a future rails app will be expected to have a server side model2 (what we normally in rails think of MVC) structure, and the client side will have its own true MVC be it angularJS, Backbone, EXT, etc.

It will be interesting to see where all this goes.

TL;DR: ruby has a future, maybe within the execution context of JS, but it isn't going away.

 

 

 

 

Nathan Van der Auwera • I see on the one hand that rails is still growing. More and more companies are switching to rails. Rails has the advantage that server-code and views are prepared in ruby: one language one platform. 

But, in practice, to get a snappy-feeling website, you already had to do a lot of javascript.

Now, with frameworks like Backbone.js/spine.js/ember.js/batman.js ... we move to a bigger client, a cleaner server. Rails will still have it's place, with the asset-pipeline and such. But on the other hand sites will do more smaller requests. So I think a server like node.js then is becoming very interesting. 

I definitely think you should learn these, just to know it's strengths and weaknesses. 

Looking further down the road, i think haskell with a webserver like yesod/warp is also looking very promising.

 

 

Rogier Svensson Krona • As said before future is never known. However besides the technical side I would like to add some comments on the business side. Rails is very community driven (at least in Scandinavia) and that somehow means that there is less activitity on the business side. While Java and many other tools, languages, frameworks etc. is "familiar as words" even for the decisionmakers of established companies, Rails is quite unknown. I think Rails has to be more exposed to these companies or else there is a risk that we get stuck in startup companies and I don´t think that´s enough even if many of them grow. This might not have much to do with the future of the Rails developer, they can switch to something else that is better, or more established on the market. 

But as usual, I might be wrong, it happens :-)  

 

 

Lets share your thoughts...

 

Thank You,

Uma Mahesh.