Heavily accessed sites as NASCAR.com and FunnyorDie.com are Ruby-built Web 2.0 sites that handle millions of hits per day. Google's Google SketchUp 6, Basecamp and Twitter are other examples of the websites running on Ruby on Rails. Solaris Express Developer Edition is an OS by Sun Microsystems that supports Ruby.

Here we have web applications that are all running successfully on Rails:

• BackPack
• 43things 
• Shopify 
• Yellow Pages 
• GitHub
• Nasa Langley Research Center 
• Motorolla 
• Open Domain Server (uses Ruby to allow people using Dynamic DNS clients to update in real time their IP configuration so that it can be mapped to static domains)
• Lucent (a 3G wireless telephony product)
• And many more!

Ruby Investments News

We have been hearing great news that many companies have started investing in this new technology. Why would a pioneering Ruby on Rails hosting company Engine Yard take $3.5 million Series A in a round led by the prominent VC firm Benchmark Capital? And why is Sun  investing in Ruby? There must be something positive, but what is it? How about these reasons:

• Ruby is a competitor to Java as a language.
• Sun recognized the value of dynamic languages. Java is still the best for large scale enterprise applications, but dynamic languages such as Ruby can be very productive in specific areas, such as prototyping, web development or for gluing various applications together.
• Solaris Express Developer Edition (SXDE) is a freely available release of Sun's next generation Solaris OS built from the source code repository at OpenSolaris.org. This release includes the latest tools, technologies and platforms that support Ruby, Rails, JRuby, RubyGems, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Java DB, GlassFish application server, NetBeans IDE and more.

Technology of the year 2007

In an article titled, "Technology of the Year 2007" (Bradley L. Jones), 2006 was said to be the interesting year for technology. Apart from big releases for Java and Microsoft, more general and lesser known technologies were nominated on Developer.com. The nominations and the finalists were an interesting cross section of technologies:

• AJAX
• JSON (JavaScript Object Notation)
• Ruby on Rails
• Ubuntu
• Virtualization

Ruby on Rails was released in 2004, and in just three years time it was at number three. Looking at the TIOBE Programming Community's survey tells us besides some great languages like JAVA, C,/C++, PHP and Python, Ruby is the next thing getting hyped up in the market, so who knows where it is going to be in a few more years.

Even more important than who is using the technology, we will discuss some of the reasons that companies may consider looking past the lack of market penetration in part III.