May 10
O’Reilly’s latest State of the Computer Book Market contains good news for Rails and Flex
It’s good to see that interest in both of these frameworks continues to grow. Here is a quote from the article (bold added by me):
In the Web design and development area, it’s worth noting that Ruby on Rails has continued its blazing growth, but Ajax books have not. The decline of both PHP and ASP are striking. Flash and Dreamweaver are also down, but as noted above, awaiting the CS3 release. Flex is starting to show its muscle.
May 31st, 2007 at 1:18 pm
i think alot of this can be attributed to the fact that once you have a rails app, you get all the ajax for free.
i spent the time and money learning the ins and outs of ajax when it hit, but then promptly forgot everything once i hit rails and learned rjs, form remote, and link remote..
now, i am RABID about learning flex.. i just gotta find out how much it costs to get my feet wet..
June 9th, 2007 at 12:46 am
I really like to see that java books are ever-so-slightly down in sales.
sergio, I’m not so sure that’s it. AJAX is so much more than the piddling amount you get for free in Rails and with the Prototype library. A really good AJAX app isn’t easy to build with Rails. I personally think AJAX is sort of the wrong approach for anything complex, and Flex/Flash are excellent alternatives if you really want a rich frontend.
AJAX has some great uses, but beyond some of the simplest uses I think Flash and/or Flex are the way to go.