Ruby on Rails is a web application framework that revolutionized how web apps are built. Created by David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH), it introduced “convention over configuration” and demonstrated that developer productivity could be dramatically improved.
Origins
DHH extracted Rails from Basecamp, a project management tool he built at 37signals. Rather than keeping it proprietary, he open-sourced the framework in 2004.
Key Principles
Rails introduced influential concepts:
- Convention over configuration: Sensible defaults reduce decisions
- Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY): Avoid code duplication
- MVC architecture: Model-View-Controller separation
- RESTful design: Resources and HTTP verbs
- Active Record: Object-relational mapping pattern
The 15-Minute Blog
DHH’s demo of building a blog in 15 minutes showed Rails’ productivity advantages. The video went viral and sparked intense interest in the framework.
Impact
Rails transformed web development:
- Twitter, GitHub, Shopify initially built with Rails
- Influenced frameworks in every language
- Proved developer happiness could be a design goal
- Established patterns now considered standard