No they weren't - ASP.NET webforms and old EF was such a pile of shit it didn't matter how fast C# was (and back then it really wasn't, granted order of magnitude better than ruby/python, but way behind JVM). The applications built with it were dog slow and buggy - they couldn't even scale in enterprise setting.
Haskell, OCaml, D with great IDE support in 2006 ? Do they have that even today ?
I mean you're suggesting people use C++ for writing web apps (and c++98/03 no less !) - that's got to be facetious.
The real contender back then was PHP and Java, RoR really addressed a lot of issues from both. They both adopted the improvements brought by it since, but it took years.
Stackoverflow and plenty of Microsoft shops are enterprise enough.
> Haskell, OCaml, D with great IDE support in 2006 ? Do they have that even today ?
I mentioned Lekshat and Merlin for a reason, way better than Ruby with TextMate and Sublime.
Yes plenty of people were using C++ for Web applications in 2000 - 2006, via Apache, ngix and IIS plugins. Microsoft had ATLServer, Borland/Embarcadero still ship their webserver to this day.
I can assert that plenty of Nokia Networks WebUIs, were powered by C++/CORBA and Perl back in 2006. Transition to Java started in 2005.
As did several CRM systems, like the original Altitude Software application server.
RoR is for people that don't care about performance to start with.
Haskell, OCaml, D with great IDE support in 2006 ? Do they have that even today ?
I mean you're suggesting people use C++ for writing web apps (and c++98/03 no less !) - that's got to be facetious.
The real contender back then was PHP and Java, RoR really addressed a lot of issues from both. They both adopted the improvements brought by it since, but it took years.