[ludicast]

Yes and no. I think:

1) Rails (I don't know Django) will continue to be the quickest way to have a quick full-stack demo/MVP. It is opinionated, and has tools like railsapps that let you customize it. So you can have a solution that includes bootstrap, authentication, stripe-payments, etc., almost completely out of the box.

2) Rails will continue to be plagued with the problems (security, slow dynamic language) etc. but it will always have workarounds like jruby, celluloid, rails-api, in-memory-models (I wish this was more common). The community is vibrant enough to keep plugging along and fixing the gaps.

3) I don't think it's a coincidence that the two most influential frameworks (Rails and Sinatra) were written in Ruby.

4) Eventually people's MVP will move to something like Scala, following the example of Twitter and LinkedIn. Static languages that encourage functional behavior improve speed and safety.

5) Play is interesting. I am checking it out now, and seeing how I can move a rails app to it.

6) Node serves the lowest-common-denominator in my opinion (it caters to non-polyglots). I use it for certain things (a workflow for prototyping phonegap apps, and client-side tooling) but I personally think it is way overhyped. However it definitely has a place, and will continue to have one.

7) If Rails does someday "die" that's okay for dhh's legacy. His framework is spiritually part of whatever comes next and raised the bar as much as Seinfeld did for television.

[Herald_MJ]

> the two most influential frameworks (Rails and Sinatra)

You admit that you're a Ruby developer, so you must see that this is slightly blinkered. Influential on what? There's not much Rails brought to the table which was entirely unique, it was just a very good MVC framework in a pleasant language that came along at the right time. And lets not forget that development on Django (which was also very influential), began long before Rails appeared on the scene.

Sinatra I've only heard of in passing, but in the Python world, web.py, Tornado and flask have been also been very significant.

[dragonwriter]

> You admit that you're a Ruby developer, so you must see that this is slightly blinkered. Influential on what?

On frameworks in other languages, both in terms of design/motivation and expectations; one indication of this is the frequency of phrases like "sinatra style framework" or "rails style framework" to either (a) describe an existing web framework for a different langauge, or (b) describe what someone is looking for in a web framework in a different language.

I'm not sure I've ever seen the same thing with Django, web.py, or Tornado. I've seen it with Flask, but its been basically a subset of the times I've seen it with Sinatra (that is, I've seen things like "Sinatra-style framework" and "Flask/Sinatra-style framework", but not "Flask-style framework" on its own.)

[Herald_MJ]

I've heard "Rails style" about as frequently as I've heard "Django style".

I've never heard "Sinatra style". In fact, when someone first mentioned Sinatra to me, they explained it as "like a web.py style microframework, for Ruby". This was a conversation between two Python developers though, so it makes sense we'd be more familiar with the Python ecosystem. But that's as much a Python-centric bias as your original comment seemed Ruby-centric bias.

Incidentally, I don't think Flask has all that much in common with Sinatra.