[ashray]

Rails and Django have moved from the obscure into the mainstream. 5 years ago if you wanted to hire a Django developer it was pretty hard. It's still way harder to find Django developers compared to PHP devs.

As a company, if you push yourself into a corner with newer tech like Node, Meteor, etc. you may come up against hiring issues. Not only that, but Rails and Django are also evolving with time so they too get better with time.

The "age" of a technology isn't the only reason why it gets selected, it gets selected because of a number of factors including features, programmer availability, programmer expenses (in terms of both time and skill), proven track record, etc. Usually age is a plus point in many ways.

Rails and Django will certainly be around and competitive. However, if you're asking from a programmer salary perspective then yes, there will be many more Rails and Django programmers by 2016, so moving into more edgy tech might give you a USP, but you may also end up without a place to work in. Maybe knowing Rails/Django + "shiny new tech" is a better combo ?

[laureny]

> Rails and Django have moved from the obscure into the mainstream.

For prototyping, maybe (and even that is arguable).

In practice, I see a lot more companies moving away from these frameworks toward JVM-based frameworks than the other way around.

These frameworks simply don't scale past the size of a small project.

[brnlsl]

Built with Rails: Github, Groupon, YellowPages, BaseCamp, Scribd, Shopify, Posterous, Airbnb, Urban Dictionary, Bleacher Report, Kickstarter...

These are not small projects.

[bjt]

> These frameworks simply don't scale past the size of a small project.

That is incorrect. From the Django side, see Instagram (http://instagram-engineering.tumblr.com/post/13649370142/wha...) and Disqus (http://blog.disqus.com/post/62187806135/scaling-django-to-8-...).

[mattmcknight]

Django and Rails both run on the JVM. Both have scaled to massive projects, even without the JVM.