Ruby on Rails
November 21st, 2005 So what’s with "Ruby on Rails?":http://www.rubyonrails.org For those that have been sleeping in the back of the class, it’s a new web development platform. "Ruby":http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/ is the language, "Rails":http://www.rubyonrails.org in the framework. The excitement revolves around claims of productivity improvements, the chance to develop new web applications far faster than a J2EE platform, more productive, scalable and succinct than a PHP/Python/Perl implementation. Ruby is an "open-source interpreted scripting language":http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/20020101.html which is completely object-orientated. It is platform independent, features closures, exception handling, mix-ins, multi-threading and runtime code improvements. In other-words it’s probably the most flexible advanced language available to your modern programmer. Rails in the framework for developing web applications using the Ruby language. Its one of the most complete frameworks around featuring MVC framework, an ORM database mapping function, HTML templating, AJAX, testing framework, Web Services, Email. Everything a web developer needs. Rails was developed by "David Heinemeier Hansson":http://www.loudthinking.com/ of "37signals":http://www.37signals.com/ to develop their online application "Basecamp":http://www.basecamphq.com/ and was opensourced over a year ago and now nears the 1.0 release. Since then a "lot":http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2005/01/20/rails.html, "loads":http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2005/06/09/rails_ajax.html, "tons":http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/web/library/wa-rubyonrails/ and "multitudes":http://www.relevancellc.com/blogs/?p=31 of things have been said about Rails. The most talked about project in web development for a long time. Its effect on the web development communities is similar to the "Spring Framework":http://www.springframework.org/ effect on the J2EE community. Spring had a "similar goal in reducing the complexity of the development effort":http://www.springframework.org/about, removing redundancy and decreasing timescales while using the best practices and patterns devised. Spring has been massively successful in the industry, many Java development houses in companies across the board have embraced it. It is having a significant effect on improving Java web development. Whether Rails will have the same effect in the corporate world is unlikely, but for hobbyists and start-ups it’s take up could be massive. One things for sure things are moving forward and Rails is a massive leap. "Liverail.net":http://www.liverail.net is going to chronicle my experiences with Rails, technology and development in general.
Sorry, comments are closed for this article.