The Castle Project - Rails for .NET

The Castle Project is an interesting open source alternative to ASP.NET / ADO.NET. Among other things, the Castle Project provides a Rails-like development framework for .NET. It has an ActiveRecord implementation built on top of NHibernate, a very Rails-like MVC setup called MonoRail, and uses NVelocity for template style views. It's worth checking out. This screencast gives a bit of an overview.

There's tough competition around the corner though, with Orcas already in beta, providing XAML, LINQ and O-R mapping.

Is .NET or Java dying?

Are C# and .NET losing ground as Martin Fowler suggests? Or is Java's market share dropping? What about Ruby? And what about the Australian market in particular?

Here's what I've been able to find.


Job Trends
Which technologies have the most demand for people?

From Indeed.com, which claims to search "millions of jobs from thousands of job sites", but I suspect may have a USA focus:




"Best Talent Index May 2007" from Best People Solutions gives an Australian perspective:



Here's job counts from the (largest?) primarily Australian job search site Seek on 5 June 2007, 3pm (today):

Keyword(s)	Number of positions found
Java	3,414
".NET" or "dot net"	2,744
"c#" or "c sharp"	1,722
ruby	100

As an aside, I remember doing a search on Seek for "ruby" about 6 months ago, and getting under 20 jobs mentioning it.


Search Engine Number of Hits

Extract from the TIOBE Programming Community Index for June 2007:

Position Jun 2007	Position Jun 2006	Delta in Position	Programming Language	Ratings Jun 2007	Delta Jun 2006	Status
1	1		Java	20.025%	-1.10%	A
2	2		C	15.967%	-2.29%	A
3	3		C++	11.118%	+0.45%	A
4	4		(Visual) Basic	9.332%	-0.85%	A
5	5		PHP	8.871%	-0.72%	A
6	6		Perl	6.177%	+0.17%	A
7	8		C#	3.483%	+0.25%	A
8	7		Python	3.161%	-0.30%	A
9	10		JavaScript	2.616%	+1.16%	A
10	19		Ruby	2.132%	+1.65%	A

I think this gives a good idea of web buzz, but suggest that most non-IT companies do not publish information about their projects and chosen technologies and languages on the web.


Conclusion
The data collected suggests that:

• Both .NET and Java are major players in the job market with thousands of positions advertised, implying wide industry adoption of both.
• Neither .NET nor Java seem to be undergoing any significant decline in jobs.
  
• Java has much more information about it on the internet, although .NET is slowing gaining ground and Java slowly losing it.
  
• Ruby is comparatively tiny but growing rapidly in terms of jobs and information on the internet.
  

Thanks
Thanks to Jason Yip and Suzi Edwards for their help finding/sourcing information.