Ruby on Rails rolls onward and upward

Will Ruby on Rails become the successor to Java? A couple of years ago I would have been jeered for asking that question. But today, scripting languages are the indisputed champs of Web development, and the open source framework Ruby on Rails leads the pack. A big milestone came last year when Apple decided to bundle Ruby on Rails with Leopard.

InfoWorld’s Martin Heller, who normally leans in a Microsoft direction, shouldered the task of comparing nine Ruby on Rails IDEs and editors. The result is a deep and graceful dive into Rubyworld. Depending on the task at hand and the OS in use, Martin has a Ruby on Rails solution for you.

No one is quite sure why Ruby on Rails has taken off so quickly relative to other perfectly good open source Web development frameworks. Is it the cool name? Is it the even cooler Signal vs. Noise blog by 37signals? Or is it Rails’ preference for “convention over configuration,” which squeezes much of the drudgery out of starting a project? Who knows, but the framework has its detractors too; they claim Ruby on Rails scales poorly and lacks a security model.

Such caveats didn’t stop Benchmark Capital from betting $3.5 million in January — not on 37signals itself, but on Engine Yard, a hosted app dev platform “dedicated to furthering innovation in Ruby, Rails and cloud computing.” When the hangers-on get that kind of money, you know something big is afoot.

Securing the cloud

Did someone say “cloud computing”? That’s becoming a favorite InfoWorld topic. Our definition of the phrase is the No. 2 Google search result. And now Ephraim Schwartz has just written an interesting article addressing two big honking objections to the trend: uncertain security and availability.

Many IT pros still squirm at the idea of ceding their virtual machines or customer databases to some service outside the firewall, especially when compliance regulations are involved. Ephraim’s story lays out the best practices to help businesses reduce risk when adopting cloud-based services. Wholesale adoption may be years away, but piece by piece, the attraction of low capital investment and quick time to market will yield a fatter cloud and a thinner datacenter.

The last hurrah

A big thank you to all those who signed our Save Windows XP petition. Given Microsoft’s past behavior, we didn’t expect a response when we sent 210,562 names to Microsoft on June 27, nor did we receive one. But we can all congratulate ourselves on a partial victory, including the availability until 2010 of “low-power” systems with XP and the Vista-to-XP downgrade option offered by major PC vendors. Those concessions, along with the accelerated schedule for Windows 7, might not have happened if you hadn’t made your voices heard.