philcrissman.com

The BBC Interactive department writes about how they’re using what amounts to Perl On Rails.

For a short while, Rails seemed like it might be a lot of hype over something new, for the sake of something new. Then it started to seem like it might be a bit of a fad, then it became clear that it was a Good Thing that Many People wanted to use. Now I’m thinking we’ll look back on development in this first decade of the 21st century, and Rails will be among the highlights that looms the largest.

I suppose when we start porting Rails to other languages and environments, continuing to call it “Rails” is more of a convenience than anything else. We could just say “Rails-like code generation and MVC” and I think that, for the most part, we’d be saying the same thing. Not all the following are deliberate “Rails Clones” per se, but we have:

• Django: Of all the alternatives to Ruby on Rails, this seems the most popular. Uses Python, a popular language with hackers and early adopters.
• TurboGears: Another Python project. I haven’t heard much about this one, but it seems to still be active.
• PHP On Trax: As the name suggests, this seems to be a deliberate port of Rails to PHP. Seeing the traction that PHP has, this is worth looking into. If you wind up in an environment where PHP is the prescribed platform, this might be a good framework.
• Symfony: Not a Rails clone (I don’t think), but it advertises as having “simple templating and helpers, smart URLs, scaffolding, object model and MVC separation, and Ajax support”, so I’d say it seems to fall into the same family of modern frameworks. Also PHP.
• Junction is apparently Rails for… Javascript? I know very little about this, so you’d best just follow the link if you’re interested.
• Steve Yegge’s Port of Rails to Javascript: I don’t know if this project has a name, or if it’s available outside of Google, but this made some headlines awhile back.
• Groovy on Grails: Yes, couldn’t forget Groovy on Grails. Groovy is a scripting language based on Ruby that runs on the Java Runtime Environment. Grails is… Rails for Groovy. If I’ve oversimplified this description, feel free to correct me in the comments.
• JRuby On Rails: I don’t thinks there’s an official site for this; my understanding is that JRuby is compatible enough with Ruby that Rails is essentially still Rails… just running on JRuby instead.

And, of course, the aforementioned Perl on Rails. Wow! Quite a list, and I’m sure I missed some frameworks, both Rails-inspired and otherwise. I’m not interested in listing all frameworks, though, but specifically those with Rails-like features.

So, yes. Whether people choose Ruby or not, it seems pretty clear that Rails-like frameworks have caught on in a big way. Suits me fine; the more I learn about the framework, the more I like it, and it’s great to know that similar frameworks exist should I have the need to use an alternate language.