What is the evidence that Rails is dying? The programming bootcamp movement is primarily Rails-based, One Month Rails just came out of YC, and I know of at least one other S13 YC company who built their web app in Rails. What seems to have changed is that not every startup is being built with Rails anymore, which I'd say is a positive thing that does not mean Rails is dying.

The hype is dying. I also think the web is moving beyond the Rails model...

The hype is definitely dying, as it should. Rails is just months shy of being 10 years old. I find it kind of amazing that using Rails was even newsworthy within the past couple of years, given how long it has been in use.

A startup choosing Rails to power their application today is like a startup choosing Linux to power their servers. It is not something worth reporting. It doesn't necessarily mean the usage is in decline though.

That's a good thing, right? Rails is a great tool for the projects that it should be used for. It should be picked on merits, not on hype.

I'm primarily a Java Developer, I tried Rails recently for the first time on a project without a SQL datastore and found that it was difficult to get a foothold as a beginner.

Switched to Scala Play and the more flexible framework allowed what I needed easily even without a lot of knowledge on Play. Rails seems like it would be great if your doing a typical CRUD app but if you need something a little outside that box it gets in the way.

That said it seems like apps aren't always just CRUD anymore and that may be why its falling in popularity.

Yeah, "real-time" is the big thing now but there no mainstream tools to simplify the development of such apps, so we're pretty much in Perl + CGI era. The ones that exist offer much looser coupling between client and server than required or just plain weird.

Totally agree with your point. Though it might seem that Rails has scaling problems and is regarded as slow and painful once the system matures, there are many many other applications to the language in itself. Plus, there's a lot to be done on the performance side of things. Ruby compilers have come a long way, but there's still plenty of room for improvement.

Just look at Puppet. It is so awesome, and it's implemented in Ruby. Ruby is definitely growing like a weed among the devops community.