What's in it for Epicurious and Allrecipes, considering they currently own the data and competing just on features probably means they lose market power?

Well, one of them would have to race to have market dominance, but imagine being the publisher / host for every recipe on the web. You could really only achieve that by opening in your platform / format to 3rd party devs and other services, to allow other tie-ins.

So... Instagram didn't invent JPEG... they just made it really simple and easy for everyone to share images, and the 3rd party services that have sprung up around it have strengthened their ecosystem. That's a bad example... but... you get what I'm saying I hope.

> his list of options does not include Objective-C or Java

He mentions Java, twice. There is nothing wrong with making web-apps in Java, and there are some nice web frameworks to help doing that.

Hmyeah, you're right, he does. But I doubt he would've included Vala if Android apps were typically programmed in it.

Depending on the type of web app you are making, there are generally better (more productive) tools for the job than Java.

In general, the productivity gap has dimnished signficantly.

Unless if we are discussing prototype/quick throwaway/very small web app. In that segment, Rails is still the king.

I was under the impression that you could build pretty decent robust apps with Rails / Django. OK, you wouldn't want to run the size of Amazon on those, but the majority websites are orders of magnitude smaller.