Tony Baer
Engine Yard's third-round funding: Ruby on Rails has left the station
Ruby on Rails (RoR) development cloud provider Engine Yard has secured $19 million in third-round financing. Engine Yard's success not only reflects the growing popularity of the RoR framework but also the fact that developer independence has kept this market segment from consolidating in the way that enterprise application, database, and operating system platforms have. With its new round of funding, Engine Yard is positioned to widely commercialize what was until recently a very obscure web application development platform.Developers exercise more leeway because their choices largely fall beneath the radar
The software development market has not consolidated in the same manner as the enterprise applications, database, or OS segments, for several reasons. Firstly, most C-level managers don't understand development languages and tools; secondly, the prevalence of open source means that there is little risk to the company if a vendor goes bust. By comparison, if the unthinkable happened to IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, or SAP then enterprises would be at risk for non-support of their mission-critical systems. Risk of failure is why product and platform choices are far more cautious as you go further up the stack.Developer independence has created the opportunity for alternative frameworks such as Ruby on Rails
A few years ago, it briefly looked like the development world was traveling down the familiar consolidation path that was impacting the rest of the software industry, as choices narrowed to J2EE (now Java EE) or the Windows-based Microsoft .NET framework.No more. While Java EE and .NET were engineered for complex, transaction-intensive enterprise systems, most modern websites are becoming more sophisticated on the front end rather than back end. Not surprisingly, many web developers have concluded that Java EE and .NET were too richly functional for their needs. Furthermore, with .NET suffering from Windows lock-in while the Java process was stalled by cumbersome standards committees, developers grew hungry for innovations that would make their lives simpler.Developer independence provided the oxygen for alternative frameworks and stacks, ranging from Spring (as an alternative to Java EE), to the LAMP stack (as an alternative to Java or C#, Oracle or SQL Server, on Windows or UNIX), or the various scripting languages such as PHP, Perl, or Python. It also prompted formal standards bodies to endorse simpler alternatives to monstrosities like Enterprise Java Beans (EJBs), such as Java Persistence Architecture (JPA), Hibernate, and EclipseLink.The same goes for Ruby on Rails (RoR). While Ruby (like Java) was originally developed for another purpose, the Rails framework put Ruby on the web development map because it simplified the tasks for Ruby developers by eliminating headaches such as:- writing configuration files that map application requests to the actions it takes
- handling multi-thread issues, because Rails offers scant support for multi-threading
- object/relational mappings, because Rails automates much of this task and automatically assigns naming conventions.
