DHH and the Rails Core team passed my “technology vendor bullshit” litmus test with ease at RailsConf Europe in Berlin. It boils down to not introducing big, revolutionary changes or features in Rails 2.0. Your typical technology vendor (Sun, MS) keeps it’s developers on a constant technology treadmill. Every so often, big changes and new sets of frameworks are announced in the technology they are peddling.
This all ensures that their 3rd party developers are kept focussed on the vendor’s wares and technology, and not distracted by things such as evaluating other approaches and possibly better techniques. Mastered COM? All change for .Net. Did we say Windows Forms? We meant Avalon WPF (see Joel Spolsky’s take on this in ‘How Microsoft Lost the API War’). Java seems a bit too simple? Here you go guys, sink your teeth into this plethora of J2EE specs - at the end of all of that you might decide POJO (Plain Old Java Objects) is the way to go anyway.
Rails has had its changes in the past of course. But it also has a fantastic versioning mechanism which means you can defer upgrading the version of Rails your application is using until you need to (if at all). This is what happens when you don’t really have a technology vendor at all - you get to focus on building your applications in the best and most efficient way possible.
Advantage: Open Source.
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