Ruby Cannot Compete

Let me start by saying that I am a Rails advocate. I would like nothing more then to see Ruby on Rails succeed in the market place. There are some issues that Rails is currently having in bridging the gap into mainstream technology. Mainly the trouble Rails is having is with the competition.
Ruby on Rails is in direct competition with Java, .NET, PHP, PYTHON etc... That means that Rails must have some characteristic that sets itself apart from all of these technologies. Let us take inventory of what Ruby on Rails has:

1. A fun way of programming
2. A language designed for web programming
3. A full scale deployable web based framework
4. Platform independence
5. Some fairly cool tools
6. Obvious academic support
7. Community support

These seem to be the building blocks to an enterprise framework, without the enterprise. If you go onto any job board and look for jobs in Ruby on Rails, then most likely you will only find a few. Most of the companies that are hiring Rails developers are the true early adopters of the Rails framework. Some are catching on, but there needs to be something that Rails offers that no other enterprise level application design framework can offer.

What Rails lacks is a true enterprise mentality. Yes, it has the community support from all us high techies, but it does not have the simplicity that will allow everyone else to use our new tools. I believe we are so scared now that our jobs will be sent to India that no one wants to make Rails to easy to use. We like Rails and want to make sure we will have fun for some time to come.

The web design community needs a new process. The old process is time consuming and reuse is extremely costly. Even working in Rails reuse has been extremely difficult due to the following problems.

1. Lack of packaging support
2. No point and click module installation.
3. Lack of a great link mechanism
4. Lack of generator support. (Yes there are generators, but we could do so much with them)
5. No point and click gem installer? (speaking out of umm here, but I have not heard of any)

Let’s bridge the gap between early adopters and enterprise acceptance of Ruby on Rails. Who is down?