A Brief History of Ruby on Rails

April 1st, 2010 · No Comments

Like many programming languages, Ruby on Rails emerged from a coder overcoming a technical obstacle. David Hansson built the original framework for Rails when working on Ruby-based projects for 37 Signals. His company is well known for their Basecamp software, and has become an actively leader in the development community. While 37 Signals continued to develop the framework, it only opened into the public domain in the summer of 2004.

The technical breakthroughs in the project led a variety of teams to contribute to the underlying source code, which became a dedicated open source project by 2005. Today, Rails is one of the leading agile languages used for web development, rivaling PHP as the leading web programming language. In order to understand the features, directions and capabilities of Rails, it’s important to understand its roots.

The Development of Ruby

Ruby was one of the first object oriented programming languages used on the way. Emerging in Japan in 1995, the language was influenced by Perl and aimed to streamline traditional coding projects. Originally developed by a programmer who wanted more power than Perl but also more structure than languages such as Python, Ruby had its first major release in 1996. A growing international development community expanded its libraries and modernized the language. As a result, it rose to prominence by the late 1990s with an expansive following. With the emergence of Rails, Ruby took on growing popularity as a web-based framework. Currently on release 1.9, the language continues to build a foundation that has increased the influence of Rails.

The Emergence and Growth of Rails

From the very beginning, Rails attracted a development community who wanted to build out a scaffold of libraries to accelerate web development. Competing with LAMP (Linux, Apache, mySQL and PHP), Rails developed to offer a complete framework with a server (Mongrel or Webrick), open database structure and extension Javascript libraries. As a result, version 2.0 allowed coders to deploy original web applications in just a few days.

With the release of Mac OSX Leopard, Apple included the framework with its OS. As a result, Rails got wider distribution and opened up an entirely new developer community. Today, Rails is approaching release version 3.0. With a beta release, the framework has shown impressive development from its first version. The new release is designed to make better use of APIs, libraries and coding standards so you can streamline your applications. With over 250 dedicated authors, the framework is emerging as the new standard in web development.

As the language has matured, it now has its own dependency management structure known as Bundler. Importantly, the core libraries are independent so you can continue to build up your Rails app as you choose. The core development team listened to the concerns of developers and made it easier to configure, debug and update applications however you choose. As a result, Ruby is more open than ever and is easier to setup, install, update and adapt to a variety of hosting environments.