First a bit of background. “Sprawa polska” it can be translated as “polish issue”. When You know polish history, than You know in 18th and 19th century Poland was not present as an independent country. We tried a lot to get our independence back, so Poles were present in every history stir at those times. And when You were growing here, Your history book covered every topic in context “sprawy polskiej”.
But what it have common with Ruby On Rails???
As I mention earlier I’m fresh convert to Ruby, Ruby on Rails and so on. Yeah. And I started thinking about how does look RoR in polish internet. Rails got a lot attention in blogosphere recently (and not only there), so I was curious how RoR presents in polish part of internet. Curious, because I’m reading a lot of polish resources (I’m proud NetManiac, right?) and rails IMO got a little attention here. Does it?
But how to measure that? When in doubt go to google. I decided to measure proportion between number of results of queries into global internet vs. polish part of it. So I googled for ruby on rails and ruby on rails site:pl. Result 2215 times more entries about rails in whole internet than in polish part. Or, putting it in other words polish part is a 1/2215 th or 0.0004% of global count.
But compare it with what? PHP! It is very popular in Poland. For PHP proportion is 1/45. So looks like PHP is much more present in Poland, than Ruby on Rails. But maybe it is everywhere. So let’s look on Germany. 1/51 for rails 1/13 for PHP. Yes, it looks like rails in Poland is still terra incognita.
So maybe compare it with Java (java and java site:pl). 1/101. And for Java in Germany (we like to compete with Germans :))) ) 1/38…
So what conclusion is? IMO Rails is totally unknown in Poland. Why? Rails is great tools for startup. But, unfortunately in Poland there is no good environment for high-tech startups. Really bad. On the side – You could not understand this before You meet with polish IRS, quality of law, and many others…
But You can look at it as opportunity – starting promotion of rails here, can be very lucrative in near future. IMO rails will brake into mainstream (well, maybe not in DHH meaning www.loudthinking.com/arc/000584.html), but it will. First will have biggest part of pie here.
Errr…. Did I found job for myself, for next year?
At Lunar Logic Polska (www.llp.pl) we’ve been building Rails apps for over a year now and have half a dozen deployed (including one for the United Nations) and one open source Rails project. I agree that Ruby is not widespread in Poland, but there is some excellent work being done here. I formed the Krakow Ruby Users Group in the Fall of 2006 and 68 people pre-registered for it’s most recent meeting. Ruby and Rails has a bright future in Krakow.
Paul