While I know the title is both asking for trouble (because of the now anecdotal original article with a similar title) and flamebaity, please read on – my goal is not to get some great stats but rather to know your opinion about the situation and discuss the possible solutions of the problem.

How it all started…

I would not like to re-iterate what has been said on several blogs, just to summarize: Matt Aimonetti, member of the Rails Activists, gave a presentation at GoGaRuCo which contained sexually explicit images (according to some – I am not here to judge whether that’s true, and it doesn’t matter anyway, as you’ll see in the rest of the post).

I am not really discussing whether it’s appropriate to have images of nude chicks in your presentation at a Ruby conference (I think it’s not, it’s unprofessional etc. – but that would be a matter of a different post Update: Someone summed this up in the article’s reddit thread nicely: If you’re a Rails programmer, or a Ruby programmer, and you don’t decry this sort of thing, you have no business calling yourself a professional. It doesn’t matter how large your website is, how easy it was to write, how much better it is over PHP or ASP.NET or J2EE; by definition, you do not belong to a professional community. That’s all there is to it.
It’s incumbent on every Ruby programmer to either reject this sort of misogynistic sewage, or accept that you’re never going to advance the promotion of Rails in the public perception because members of the community still think it’s edgy or cool to put pictures of strippers in their public presentations.
And here’s a hint: if your decided reaction is to talk about how unimportant this is, how much it doesn’t matter, or how much it doesn’t offend you personally, you probably don’t understand professionalism at all.) because sadly, I think there are far bigger problems here than that – shedding light on them is the real purpose of the article, not talking about pr0n at GoGaRuCo again.

Would You Walk Into a Hindu Temple with Your Shoes on?

I have been living in India for 2 months last summer, working on a Rails startup. Maybe I am odd or something, but I knew that I had to remove my shoes when entering a Hindu temple, and _no one had to convince me (what’s more, I didn’t even think about it for a second) wether this is the right thing to do, why is it so, whether I should do otherwise etc_. This is a similar situation – I just don’t do X when speaking at a conference, if I suspect that X makes feel even one person in the room uncomfortable, whether because of his gender, race, nationality, Ruby/Rails skills, penis size or what have you – _regardless whether I think it’s fine for me, my wife, for other members of the community and/or the majority of the room_.

The trick is, how does a *hindu* feel when I enter a temple in footwear (even if that is perfectly acceptable in my country, culture, family, friends) – it’s perfectly irrelevant how do *I* feel in the given situation. Using the previous paragraph, try to apply this to a Ruby/Rails conference.

Shit happens…

Until this point in the story, I see no problem at all, and could even agree with the guys asking “what’s wrong with you, don’t make a fuss out of nothing” – the pictures Matt used are non-problematic in my book, and he had no idea they are problematic in anyone’s book – theoretically it could have worked, but the point is, *it did not*. Some members of the Ruby community got offended, and here our story begins.

…and hits the fan

One of the real problems is that after this has been pointed out, Matt still keeps answering “As mentioned many times earlier, I don’t think my presentation is inappropriate.”. As I mentioned two paragraph above, it doesn’t matter what do you think, unless of course, you don’t care about offending some members of the community. In that case you should not try to apologize at all. However, if you are trying, reciting “I don’t think my presentation is inappropriate” will not put and end to the discussion. It just doesn’t work. Why can’t you just simply apologize, admitting that this was a bad move (because it offended some, not because porn, sexual images or whatever in presentations are bad, per se) and finish the discussion?

Rails is Still a Ghetto

However, in my opinion that’s still not the worst part of the story, or to put it differently, some members of the Rails community still found a way to make things worse, by applauding to all this:

OK, you say, we are all used to DHH’s style, this is just how the guy is. That’s (kind of) cool, but I heard that most of the Rails core team (and obviously Matt himself) has the same opinion – and that’s a much more serious problem, because it means that a Rails activist, backed by DHH and other Rails core members finds all this OK, despite of the fact that numerous people in the community voiced their opinion otherwise.

This is not about being a closed-minded prude, shouting for police and suing everyone using sexually explicit images in a presentation. This is not even about women, as I have seen both males and females on either side of the fence. This is about mutual respect – I don’t agree with you, but respect your feelings. Or not, as demonstrated in this case.

So Rails continues to be the most socially unacceptable framework – associated with arrogance, elitism and whatnot in the past – now add pr0n images in presentations. Thankfully RailsConf is held in Las Vegas, and that should calm down all the people who associate Rails with all this crap :-). The real problem is that people associate you with the tools you are using – think Cobol, PHP, Java… or Rails. By being part of the Rails community people associate me with Railsy stereotypes automatically, which aren’t nice at all right now.

I hear you, dear creme-de-la-creme Rails (core) member, I know you don’t give a shit, and you think this is all prude babbling – because your hourly rate is more than some of us earn in a day, and you’ll be sought after even if Rails will have a much worse image than it has now. But 99.9% of us are not in the ‘circle of trust’ and would be happier if Rails would not be constantly associated with a ghetto.

MINASWUBN

In case you are wondering what does the acronym stand for, it’s “Matz is Nice And So We Used to Be Nice”. Unfortunately, the stuff I don’t like about the Rails community is sneaking into Ruby too, it seems, as the above case demonstrates. Besides this, the count of aggressive comments and reactions on various blog posts is really disturbing to me. Please (at least Rubyists) try to avoid being contaminated by all this shit and stop thinking you are cool because you can swear on a forum (always in anonymity). You don’t have to be a douchebag just because you are a Rubyist / Rails coder, as surprising as this might sound to some.

Conclusion

I think “incidents” like this and getting more and more antisocial members are inevitable by-products of growth in a community. The questions is, whether, and if, how, do we stop them. The problem is that it seems to me the Rails “top management” doesn’t want to stop them (what’s more, even encourages them) in the first place (please prove me otherwise – maybe I don’t see the full story – I’ll be the happiest to admit that I am talking bullshit).

I have to admit I have no clue what would be the right move – burying our heads in the sand and pretending everything is fine is not. Please leave a comment if you have an idea or anything to add.

In part I I wrote about the hows and whys of gathering gem/plugin usage data based on Rails Rumble submitted user information, and in this part I would like to present my findings. So without further ado, here we go:

Prototype/jQuery

I already covered this in part I, but for completeness’ sake, here is the chart again:

It seems that jQuery is (not so) slowly replacing Prototype as the javascript framework of Rails – which is still better (from the Prototype POV) than with Merb, where jQuery is the default framework (oh yeah, I know, Merb is everything-agnostic etc. etc. but I think vast majority of merbists are using Datamapper, jQuery etc. (?)).

Skeleton Applications

Well… this chart is rather dull:

One in every three teams used a skeleton application (which in this context can be replaced with ‘Bort’).
The sovereignity of Bort is a bit surprising given that it’s not the only player in the field by far – there are definitely others, like ThoughtBot’s suspenders, Blank by James Golick, starter-app by Pat Maddox, appstarter by Lattice Purple just to name a few.

I am not sure about the others, but the absence of suspenders from the chart has more to do with the fact that it was not yet publicly released before Rails Rumble – I am basing this claim on the fact that a lot of people used the gems/plugins which, combined together, are basically suspenders.

However, this doesn’t alter the fact that Bort is immensely popular – great stuff, Jim.

Testing Frameworks

I think there are (at least) 2 things to note here:

1. Testing in Ruby/Rails is not considered optional even facing a very tight deadline. Even if we assume that the 49% didn’t test at all (which surely doesn’t sound too realistic – they probably just went with Test::Unit), more than half of the teams did!
2. Though testing tools are a much debated topic nowadays, and the winner is not clear (yet) – I would guess, based on the above results there is roughly an 1:1:1 ration between Test::Unit, rspec and shoulda *currently* – there are definitely interesting alternatives to Test::Unit.

Mocking

Not much to add here – though the above chart says nothing about how much people are using e.g. Mocha with rSpec (vs. using the rSpec built-in mocking tools), one thing is clear – as a stand-alone mocking framework, Mocha reigns supreme.

Exception Notification

Another point for ThoughtBot (not the last one in this list) – Hoptoad has no disadvantage compared to the more traditional Exception Notifier (if we don’t count getting an API-key, which takes about a minute) – on the upside, you get a beautiful and user friendly web GUI.

Full-text Search

I found the above chart interesting for two reasons:

1. I thought that Ferret and/or acts_as_solr are still somewhat popular – it turns out they are not
2. I also thought Thinking Sphinx is the de-facto fulltext search plugin, and didn’t know about Xapian – well, I learned something new again.

Uploading

ThoughtBot did it again – Paperclip is already more popular than the old-school attachment-fu. I am always a bit cautious when someone challenges the status quo (like Nokogiri vs.
Hpricot, Authlogic vs. Restful Authentication, attachment-fu vs. Paperclip etc.) but it seems Paperclip is ripe to take over. You can find some interesting tutorials here and here.

User Authentication

Another dull graph for you:

I am wondering how homogenous this chart would be if Authlogic would have appeared earlier – it seems like a strong challenger (already watched by around 260 people on github) and I am sure it will take a nice slice of the pie in the future.

What’s more interesting is the openID support: more than one third of the apps offered openID authentication, and quite a few of them *solely* openID.

Misc

• factory_girl was used to replace traditional fixtures in every 6th of the apps!
• HAML/SASS is quite popular – used in about 20% of the applications
• Hpricot was the only HTML/XML parser used (in 7 apps alltogerher)

What I am happy about the most is that there is still a lot of innovation going on in the Rails world – as you can see, newer and newer plugins/gems are appearing and in some (in fact, a lot of) cases are dethroning their good ol’ competitors. There is a lot of competition going on in almost every major area of Rails web development, and this is always a good thing.

Just two weeks after Ruby on Rails was featured in the prominent Dr Dobb’s Journal, it gets into the limelight again, in even greater power than before: Guess who is staring at you from the frontpage of Linux Journal? Yes, it’s DHH… and the reason? The current issue is full of Ruby and Rails articles, tips and tricks etc. Read the full story at David’s blog.