[Web-SIG] Just lost another one to Rails

[Martijn Faassen]

Todd Grimason wrote:
[snip]
> In other words, good docs, good tutorials, sample applications (beyond
> 10-liners), and yes, as much as many coders seem to distain it,
> good-looking websites. If someone coming to web programming from X or Y
> language (X or Y not being python or ruby), and looks at the Rails site
> compared to almost any of the python frameworks, they'd very likely
> conclude it [Rails] is a more mature, widely used, and professional
> toolkit -- even though in many cases that's completely not true. 

Right, Rails does buzz and marketing right. For more on my thinking on 
that, see here:

http://faassen.n--tree.net/blog/view/weblog/2005/04/06/0

> There is probably more sample code (test apps, example sites) on the
> Rails site in teh past 6 months than a bunch of the python kits all
> combined over years. 

Zope 3 actually has a lot of sample code in the Zope 3 book by Stephan 
Richter, which is online, just extremely well hidden in an obscure and 
scary wiki, last I checked. :)

I agree very much that much of the reason Rails has the buzz now is 
because it does marketing right. Plone is another example of a project 
which does marketing well. Good marketing is a lot of work that 
developers might not want to do; they may not have the skills or 
insight, and beside that they'd rather write code instead. But assuming 
your goal is to compete with Rails, you're going to have to do a good 
marketing job. For marketing to developers, this also means writing good 
tutorials and introductions and making them easy to find.

Regards,

Martijn