Web Forefront

Marketing plays a huge role in the technology selection process, probably more than some people realize, and we in the development community who are mostly educated as engineers are not very good at it -- more on this subject Why Engineers Suck at Selling . Yes, one can argue all the technical merits one wishes for Ruby and Python, but when your faced with convincing minds that have been seared tens or hundreds of times with Java's 'write once run everywhere' or .NET's 'driving business value with the Microsoft platform', you tend to face an uphill battle all the way to the top, where the final decision process ultimately takes place.

My personal account on building something with Ruby and Python -- or more specifically Rails and Django / TurboGears which are respective web frameworks for each language -- was building a site for Mashup Soft , a start-up I am currently trying to get off the ground. For this project I didn't need any marketing influence, I actually knew how much effort and money it would take to build a similar site using Java from my previous experience on projects of the same size, so given my resources, I was actually willing to take a leap of faith -- read desperate enough -- and try anything else that promised to be faster.

Well, 6 weeks into the process using Ruby and Python I reached the milestone I had estimated at 12 weeks using Java. Great! The risk payed off, with all the possible future headaches, bugs and scalability issues aside, which would probably still creep up no matter what platform I had chosen, its the nature of software, Java & .NET aren't perfect either, but that's another story.

Still, even though I experimented first hand with the power and payoff offered by Ruby and Python, I felt both communities were in some dire need of marketing -- like most other open source projects -- in order to appeal to a more risk-averse developer audience outside of the current circles in which both communities thrive, which are mostly start-ups looking for reduced development times.

Well, based on the mass TV campaign 'I am a Pc-I am a Mac' but applied to the Ruby Rails / Java community, I can't help but think that marketing in this same fashion to geeks will eventually pique the interest of more than a few Ruby and Python naysayers and lead to wider adoption in IT shops, so with that said, I will kick off this section at webforefront.com dedicated to Ruby and Python web developments, and leave you with the rather corny but effective video on the subject.