Watch out RoR, they're coming

Ruby on Rails is easy to patch yourself, it has a low buy-in, and it is cross platform. .Net MVC is giving medium businesses and enterprise web portals a much needed face-lift.

What I don't see a lot of, is stories of one cannibalizing the other or competing solutions. You don't see many headlines "Startup chose ASP.Net, it made all the difference"

You can see that search volume growth for "rails" had been flat for the year before Ruby on Rails came out. Since then, "rails" trended the same as "ruby on rails" at every point in the last six years. Right now, the search volume for "rails" is still trending 10 points higher on the graph than it did before RoR came out; to put that into perspective, searches for the full name "Ruby on Rails" have been less than 10 points since the start of 2008. All this indicates is that people have learned they can get good results by typing "rails" instead of the full name.

I want to add that it's possible that nearly all correlation between "rails" and "ruby on rails" is due to the possibility that google double-counts "ruby on rails" searches as "rails" since that word appears in the full name. However, the 10 point increase in "rails" still trends 5 points higher than the 5 point increase in "ruby on rails" during the same period of first release in 2005 to now in 2010, which is double. But anyway, the point isn't that my stats are any better; the point is to demonstrate that it's hard to make an inference based on two keywords, and even harder to predict what will happen based on this information, even if it was accurate.

No news here except that there are many MVC web frameworks these days.

ASP.NET MVC is an open source (used loosely [MS-PL]) framework built on a proprietary framework, using a proprietary language that runs on a proprietary stack.

In my experience, there hasn't been a lot of cross shopping of these two technologies. A developer who gravitates towards RoR is far more likely to look at a Python framework than ASP.NET MVC. Likewise, an ASP.NET developer is more likely to cross shop something like Java; pick a framework, any framework.

When I started to use RoR around 2006 it was quite difficult to find good documentation. So you had to use Google quite a lot to find something useful. Nowadays RoR is better documented and you can find everything you want to know in a few central places. So people may have to search less to find what they want.

http://www.google.com/trends?q=%22asp.net+mvc%22,+%22ruby+on...