Obie is getting some links by showing off this graph which demonstrates the percentage growth of Ruby versus Java jobs:
Having come from the Java world and loving Ruby/Rails development, I’m happy with this. However, there is a flip side. Take a look at the absolute number of jobs posted:
We still have a long way to go.
I will copy & paste what I wrote at Obie’s original post: Ok, I will agree with this: this kind of comparison is very poor to say the least. On the other hand, let’s keep up with the non-scientific toying and do a more ‘fair’ comparison. It is a fact that today, Rails is driving the Ruby job trends. Java has a much broader audience, going from mobile devices, to low-level system integration and a lot of other stuff that Rails doesn’t cover.
If we stay at the niche in hand: Web Development, we have to compare Ruby against, for example, “java web” (with the quotes). This narrows down the Java job offers to the Web niche and the comparison becomes much more interesting. Just try it out.
The problem is that indeed.com (or other job trends websites for that matter) doesn’t have advanced drill down options enough to get a fair comparison.
Fabio makes a good point, but perhaps the real comparison should be with “rails” rather than “ruby”. Of course, I reran the graphs, and you get almost identical results which roughly confirms Fabio’s point that Rails is driving Ruby in the area of recruitment, at least.
I just discovered the same thing over at my site
Based on the comments on this post, I also compared a bunch of web frameworks. Spring MVC is the clear winner for growth, and PHP/Struts still dominate the web framework world.
Perhaps this graph is an even more telling.
You can’t arrive at any valid conclusions by comparing percentage of growth between mature and new entities. My kid’s lemonade stand sold 2 glasses on Monday, 4 on Tuesday and 8 on Wednesday. That’s 100% growth every 24 hours! Holy cow! That’s far more growth than any Fortune 500 company has had this month! My kid must be a billionaire!!!!! Oh, wait. Yeah. Compare the total number of jobs to get realism.