So the RAC team has set out to answer the question, is Rails truly ready for the enterprise?  This question has to be on more minds than just ours, and finding the right answer is likely to help companies save a lot of money and potential pain.Our analysis serves to answer a number of specific questions and concerns surrounding Rails.  These are questions that we have seen asked time and time again, by our own clients and by the clients of other firms.  These topics are:

• General newness and lack of enterprise penetration
• Scalability and performance
• Resource availability
• Maintainability
• Open source and lack of company to hang
• "Fly-by-night" potential
• Security

General newness and lack of enterprise penetration

Ruby was invented by Yukihiro Matsumoto, inheriting from Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada and Lisp in order to minimize programmer's work and confusion. Matz (Yukihiro Matsumoto) was trying to "make Ruby natural, not simple." He added that he created it to be "more powerful than Per and more Object-Oriented than Python."

Ruby's key features include the following:

• Simple syntax, partially inspired by Eiffel and Ada
• Exceptional handling features designed to make it easy to handle errors.
• Operators that are syntactic sugar for the methods and are easily redefined.
• Complete, full, pure object-orientation -- all data in Ruby is an object, in the sense of Smalltalk: no exceptions.
• Single inheritance.
• Code blocks -- closures -- are first-class citizens in Ruby and widely used in nearly all Ruby programs.
• A mark-and-sweep garbage collector that works with all Ruby objects.
• Dynamically loaded extension libraries if an OS allows.

If we look at the key events happening in the history of scripting languages and frameworks, we'd observe that RoR is getting significant hype in the market since its release. Check out the survey here.

Contrary to popular belief about Rails, it does have very significant enterprise penetration -- with a number of very popular sites and systems utilizing its technology. 

Ruby – A beautiful language that has been evolving for some years. Open-source and not controlled by a middleware vendor.

Rails - A framework that has been extracted from a real life application to make development easier and faster. Not designed by a committee to solve every problem of the world, including the imaginary ones. Like Ruby, Rails is open-source and not controlled by a middleware vendor. Rails is not the last framework you will ever need (which is a good thing!), but it sets the right tone and serves as an example of what frameworks and libraries should look like in our brave new world.

Ruby on Rails - Quickly displacing PHP, ASP and J2EE as programmers' development framework of choice, thanks to its elegant design and emphasis on practical results. It is well designed to build.

We will be talking about some of the well-known companies that do invest in and use Ruby on Rails in part II.