Relishing Ruby and Rails

I've been trying to keep-up with what's going on in the scripting world. Perl6 still isn't out yet. And Ruby and Groovy seem to be the hottest and most popular & promising.

Groovy is still trying to win support and evolve to a JSR implementation, and achieve a big following. Not clear yet if it's going to succeed or if it has stalled out. The attempted revival of the "Practically Groovy" series at IBM developerWorks suggests maybe it's still alive and kicking.

Ruby is positively on Fire! And Rails is a big part of the reason for that (though there is a similar "Grails" project for Groovy). I've been wading my way through books on Ruby. The best ones were from the PragmaticBookshelf, but now O'Reilly has a some good Ruby books too. So now my Ruby reading list is as follows (I'm about half-way through it):

• Programming Ruby (2nd ed.), by Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt (read this one first)
• Enterprise Integration with Ruby
• Ruby Cookbook
• Agile Web Development with Rails
• Rails Recipes
• Ruby on Rails Up and Running
• Ruby in a Nutshell
• From Java to Ruby: Things Every Manager Should Know

So far, it seems like Ruby and Rails is an amazingly hyperproductive language and fraemwork that takes what many feel are the best of Smalltalk, Python, and Perl, makes it fun and elegant, and makes web development and enterprise integration for simple to glue together production-quality stuff in less than half the usual time.

So right now I would say that Ruby (and Rails) seems to be winning out over Groovy, and some (including Bruce Tate) even think it's beating out Java. I guess we'll see. Right now Ruby (with Rails) appears to lay claim to the title of scripting language with the fastest growing popularity and user-base.