Hacker News Reader

...exciting things will happen

Well, I'd like to believe that, but Dreamhost has had Ruby support for quite some time. I figured they're about the biggest of the shared hosting providers.

Maybe the new cPanel will make it even easier, though...

View on HN

I think the "long tail" of shared hosting providers use CPanel, with no support for ruby. Including Ruby in CPanel means every Linux host will be able to offer it, and it also means that Ruby on Rails will become a standard, the same way PHP is. That's a huge difference from where Rails is at today. Most won't deploy it, but having built-in support for Perl, PHP, and Rails shows just how important the language is, even though most people outside startups don't use it currently.

Although, if somebody just wants a quick script, they will probably use PHP. Ruby on Rails is more for somebody who wants to create an entire database driven web-based application. So, maybe Ruby on Rails is a niche. What do you think?

If I just want a quick script, I'll just use Ruby without Rails. Plain erb. Or Nitro, or Merb. There are several options for using Ruby for Web apps/sites without having to take on the Rails stack.

Rails may be a niche tool, but it's not the only Web option for Ruby developers.

Your cup of Kool-aid is still full?!

I'm sipping. :)

When time permits I'll be looking at Scala.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com