Is Amazon getting in on the Rails fever?

According to Mr. Rails himself, Amazon is getting in on the Rails fever

UnSpun is a Rails application that relies heavily on the Amazon Mechanical Turk Web Services.  It allows you to "see the community consensus on what's the best or the worst, the scariest or the funniest, the tastiest or the dumbest, UnSpun provides the right amount of structure to make that possible".  Once a list is created, its sent to the Amazon Mechanical Turk which helps get the list populated with items, as well as the most relevant web links for the items.

Perhaps Amazon chose Rails because Ruby is the best programming language, or maybe because it's #5 on the Best Model View Controller Frameworks list, or maybe because its #194 on the Most Promising New Technologies list, or maybe because ActiveRecord is the Best ORM Layer?

Whatever the reason, it's interesting to see a company like Amazon embrace Rails.  Maybe one of these days I'll get around to building something in Rails, brand it as Web 4.0 and rake in a cool billion?

 

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# re: Is Amazon getting in on the Rails fever?

Thursday, November 30, 2006 11:43 AM by Tom    
Let's not get ahead of ourselves and start crediting this feature to Amazon itself. In reality, it's probably just a developer or two that launched this product, and not the Mothership. I'm not looking to take the wind out of Rail advocates' sails, but I'd hate to see a repeat of the fervor of the PHP community after Yahoo announced it's use of it in their front-end (as a glorified templating language).

# re: Is Amazon getting in on the Rails fever?

Thursday, November 30, 2006 9:30 PM by Steve    
I'm not sure what you mean by not getting ahead of ourselves and start crediting this feature to Amazon itself. It doesn't particularly matter if it was only 1 or 2 developers, its an Amazon property no matter how you slice it. I agree that it has very little meaning, however, I do find it to be an interesting development. We should also keep in mind that Jeff Bezos has a few reasons to hope that Rails and more particularly 37Signals stays in the spotlight. The more people that use Rails, the more people get to know 37Signals. The more people that know 37Signals the better return on investment Jeff might get.

http://www.37signals.com/svn/archives2/bezos_expeditions_invests_in_37signals.php

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