I really don't see how this would have a major negative impact on speed. If anything, it will allow CSS files to be smaller reducing the amount of data being downloaded to the client and may actually improve performance.
Obviously there is a belief that mobile technology is going to grow. The numbers today say are that Flash is 96% of users and HTML5 is 74%. If people didn't believe that the mobile segment was growing at an enormous rate, no business stakeholder would even consider HTML5.
They're both implementations of the MVC pattern, but short of that there seem to be very few similarities between them. Admittedly, I've only built one project in RoR, but the framework itself required much less configuration and Ruby is a huge departure from the Java/C# coding style.
The MVC design pattern has been in use since 1979; it's nothing new. It's also worth noting that Java devs and Microsoft devs were building MVP (a modified version of MVC) based apps in the 90's.
I'm not trying to dis RoR, because it seems like a pretty solid framework and nobody can deny that the 37signals guys were the motivating force behind the current wave of MVC development. However, what they created was a better web implementation of an existing pattern and I honestly think Django and CakePHP are much more obvious imitations.
Finally, it's worth noting that the ASP.NET MVC framework is open source and has similar license to RoR.
ASP.NET MVC is a far closer imitation of Ruby on Rails than either CakePHP or even Groovy on Grails. Django isn't even an imitation, by any stretch of the imagination.
The similarities between ASP.NET MVC and Rails aren't just that they both use MVC, that's shallow. ASP.NET MVC is blushingly similar, nothing else comes even close, not even those who claim to try to imitate Rails.
I'm not saying ASP.NET MVC is bad, in fact it seems pretty good. But anyone using and liking it really ought to have a look at the original, from where Microsoft lifted it wholesale. Those guys must be doing something right.
There are definitely 2 distinct cultures of developers using the MS Web Stack. Webforms (what most people typically think of when they thing of .NET) is an attempt to get desktop developers on the web. While it's possible to get good markup out of Webforms, most of the default features are a table-based, inline styled abomination. Until MVC came out, I actually worked on an open source project that focused on fixing the markup generated by ASP.NET.
That being said, the new generation of ASP.NET MVC devs is top notch. People like Scott Hanselman and Phill Haack have helped make some vast improvements in the stack.
This is very true. Microsoft has not done a good job reaching out to younger developers, which probably hurts them far more than they realize. While I like working with .NET now, I was 100% PHP & Perl dev through high school and college. When I graduated I was hired at a company that built CMS products and needed me to know PHP, ASP.NET and ColdFusion. I realized pretty quickly that my PHP and Perl skills translated pretty well. The hardest thing for me was getting used to writing real apps in an object oriented language.
Hey all,
I'm the original author and I saw this popup, so I figured I post a quick comment.
A lot of people have pointed out that I didn't really include and example of a start-up using, which is a legit point. If you're interested in seeing a good example, check out http://stackoverflow.com They're a great example of a company that's very open about their experiences with .NET (both good and bad) and they generally post them on their blog at http://blog.stackoverflow.com/category/aspnet/
If you have specific questions, feel free to reply and I will do my best to answer them.
