I attended the St. Louis Web Developers monthly meeting last night. The topic was Ruby On Rails. As I’ve written before, I’m interested in RoR, for the huge productivity agains (5X-20X) and its simplicity. The complexity of ASP.NET, my primary programming technology, does not sit well with me for small projects and RoR may be the alternative I’m looking for.

The presenter compared the excitement over RoR to the Java revolution a decade ago, but as of yet this fledgling language and framework hasn’t eked out any enterprise market share. My biggest concern is resource availability. It’s difficult for me to justify building a site with this for a client. Then they can’t find anyone to work on it other than me. I advocate using technologies that are widely accepted for that reason. Another reason to be tentative is hosting options. It’s also easy to be seduced by how quickly one can generate a simple app performing CRUD operations, but what happens when requirements demand a piece of complex functionality and being new to the technology hinders one’s ability to predict difficulties ahead.

I guess I need to get a book and learn more. If I start using this language perhaps my comfort level will increase, and as demand rises, I may be ahead of the curve – not a bad place to be.