During the past months, we were running three InfoQ research items on the topic of “Ruby On Rails State of Practice”. In this news item, we will be taking a look at some of the findings to give you a good sense of the state of the art in Ruby programming.
In the first issue, we asked about the state of deployment and management practices. We received over two hundred votes, and the result looks like this (remember that the y-axis indicates the value-proposition, where the bottom means a higher value):
More than 50% of the respondents are using Nginx and Capistrano at the moment, but many are also considering moving to Heroku (106 votes). Lighttpd and Mongrel are still in use by about 15% but they are mostly moving away from them. Taking a closer look at some of the options, we can see Nginx is highly valued by many users:
Thin has many fans too, but there’s also a group of users moving away from it.
The second question was about frontend technologies for Rails development, where we received 213 votes.
Unsurprisingly, Bootstrap is hugely popular with 75% of votes. Coffeescript too seems to be very popular among Rails developers, as we can see from the heatmap:
Dojo is clearly on the downgrade:
Knockout seems to be an upcoming trend, with several clusters of users that are thinking about or already migrating to it:
In the last part, we asked about testing frameworks. Unfortunately, we received only 42 votes, too few to make meaningful predictions. If we look at the votes, we can see that most developers choose RSpec, Capybara and Jasmine for testing.
What do you think about these results? Are there any surprises for you, or are they in line with your experience?