lapusta

No, it's not. USICS issued a new memo in january, which made H1B hard to use for bodyshops(~consulting companies). As a result only 25% of total quota is currently submitted and numbers are rising very slow(1-2% a week).

Maybe, I was evaluating Ruby for my university tasks even before Pyhon, but found a lack of good GUI and Plot/Math libraries.

I've done some professional development with Symfony and Grails. Both close to RoR(Grails even better in my opinion). I also use Python as my scripting language, and tried Ruby/RoR, but it didn't fit my needs.

I'm language agnostic, but you must remember that other languages evolve too. PHP got namespaces and closures, C# - some dynamics, and Groovy - support from SpringSource/VMWare and is most popular language on JVM: Jython, JRuby, Scala - all far behind.

>fight with Python and PHP on their markets?

PHP has lots of opensource web-apps: OpenX, Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, phpBB, SugarCRM, Magento eCommerce, MediaWiki you can just download and run on any hosting in couple of minutes. Every app has a community behind it. Haven't heard about anything as popular built with Rails(except Redmine).

Python - studied in Universities like MIT and can be found in any UNIX/Linux distribution. Lots of bindings and libraries(SciPy, NumPy, Twisted). Ruby bindings and libraries are far behind.

Ruby painly needed a milestone of stability. Ruby's market is Rails, and while I admit some projects(JRuby, IronRuby, Ruboto, Macruby) trying to explore other possibilities, they haven't got much further than exploration. So what's up with Rails? It's market won't be growing:

1. Django/Grails/Symfony/ASP.NET MVC are closing gaps in Python/Java/PHP/.NET communities, making RoR not as much attractive as it was couple years ago. Means much less new developers form these communities.

2. Today's start-ups are moving to RIA, where the UI is built via Capuccinno/SproutCore/GWT/Flex and Rails doesn't provide much benefit here compared to others.

3. Ruby hardly can fight with Python and PHP on their markets.

I admit Ruby influence and innovations, but I won't put my bets on it.

I'd say "most community-lead ones".

Check out Spring Framework bugs(about hundred total): 8 for 3.0.3 (current stable) 0 for 2.5.6 (previous stable)

Does it have any improvements on table locking during ALTER operations? Or are there any other engines capable of dynamic DB schema?

Having Ultimate Edition you get Ruby, Python, PHP along with Java technologies and languages.

Web IDE, RubyMine & PyCharm are just 1 plugin editions for less price.

Maybe it's the first step of integrating mysql.com into Oracle's web-site and developer site into OTN as they are doing with sun.com now.

They promised MySQL will be a separate division inside company, but said nothing about the site AFAIR.