At this point in time, Rails is basically the reason I have a career, get paid, and provide for my family. Sure, any programmer could say that about any framework/language/platform they use regularly I suppose, but in fact Rails is the first platform I've been able to leverage to get great jobs and work with great people. Before that, various combinations of WordPress and homegrown PHP code were my bread-and-butter but I also did projects in Java, Python, and others. (I still shutter when I remember what I had to go through to work in Java...)
I think the thing that was so amazing about Rails when it really got popular was that you could build almost any sort of web app you could imagine and everything would just make sense. The full-stack, the conventions, the fact it took much less time to get something working than its competitors...it was SO much easier to build stuff and stop reinventing the wheel.
I can't tell you how many times in the PHP world I had to figure out how to write code to send hand-tuned SQL to the server just to do basic stuff. Obviously, these days you can do cool framework-y full-stack stuff in PHP as well, but in many respects that was a response to the rise of Rails. (Actually, I must admit, I built a PHP 5 framework somewhat inspired by Rails before I jumped onboard the bandwagon...what prompted that was Zend announcing their PHP 5 framework, at which point I figured I'd either drop my framework and go with Zend or...just go with Rails, learn Ruby, and stop fighting it. I'm so thankful I decided to do just that!)
So thank you Ruby, and Rails on your 10-year birthday. You have made this programmer a happy man.
I also owe much of my professional success to rails dhh and so many others in our community. Convention over configuration is still a revolutionary concept. Thank you!
Rails has also been successful by absorbing or beating competing frameworks in Ruby, inspiring a lot of other languages to come up with similar frameworks...
>> any programmer could say that about any framework/language/platform they use regularly I suppose
True. I know lot of guys made killing with Wordpress, Drupal, Perl, Java. Networking, etc., Career success is nothing to with any particular technology.
I started learning Ruby for fun roughly 6 months before the first release of Rails. Although I rarely use Rails today (more because I rarely work on full-stack projects), it paved the way for a lot of the Ruby community today. That was a lucky coincidence, but I can draw a pretty direct line between Rails and me making a living off Ruby, running two conferences in the space and having met a lot of awesome people in the community.
Most people don't realize how ground-breaking Rails was back then. It basically went against the common assumption that long up-front setup is just part of the project. I seriously had people complaining that they couldn't bill as much on small projects if that became standard. The 15-minute blog might be a joke today, but back then, it was an awesome way of showing that Rails focused on making things quick to start (I don't like to say easy, it never was).
I am also surprised on how much of the general concepts from the 0.x versions survived. Sure, things have gotten bigger and parts got replaced, but the general structure is still the same.
If you're interested in some of the milestones along the way and the context of web programming back in 2004 and 2005 when Rails came out, I made a timeline for my talk at RailsConf this year: http://www.recursion.org/looking-backward/
It was fun to research all this stuff. It's interesting to see how far back some of this stuff goes. For example, Rails gets much of its power from Ruby's flexibility. Ruby is heavily inspired by Smalltalk. The first research version of Smalltalk came out in 1972! The MVC pattern was also first developed at PARC, back in 1978.
It's easy for people to bag on Rails because like anything, as time goes on things evolve and pain points are discovered, etc. But as someone old enough to remember writing Servlets + JSP + miles of XML configs, Rails was such a HUGE HUGE HUGE thing. I remember being so blown away by how fast and easy it was to stand up a new web app. We take that sort of thing for granted today but for those of us old enough to remember stuff like Spring and JEE 1.3, it was incredible.
how about session vs entity beans? or applets? java tried hard to be that magical framework, but always fell squarely on the wrong side of complicated.
I remember going to RubyConf 2004 in Reston. DHH was there talking about Rails. I was sitting there with like 30 other people listening to him and thinking "I dunno man, cgi.rb pretty much does the job for me". If I had been thinking straight I would have rewritten RubyForge in Rails and never looked back... oh well!
I wasn't at RubyConf 2004 (back then I thought Ruby was some weird Perl-ish language from Japan, not worth my attention) but for my RailsConf talk I dug up some old blog posts about what it was like when DDH first spoke about Rails at that conference.
Wow, I'm now 38 and recall falling in love with Rails at the age of 28. I was battling with .NET WebForms at the time, Rails was a breath of fresh air. Martin Fowler got me into Ruby about 6 months before Rails popped up. I still write Ruby + Rails almost every day.
Oddly, I'm starting to think Java might be the future of everything if it can shed it's huge_config.xml + FactoryFactoryFactory obsession, which I believe is happening :)
This is something that, knowing at thing or two about OOP but not being a java pro at all, I've recently come to wonder about: why does Java use all this Factories of Factories ? I mean where does this coding pattern come from? What aspect of the language it represents? Is it because of multi inheritance? Why then in other multi inheritance OOP languages this doesn't happen as much as in Java ?
At the same time Rails came about there was also Nitro, another Ruby Web framework. It too used this form of MVC.
I much preferred Nitro to Rails for being more lightweight as well as more amenable to evolving from bare-bones PHP-style single-file Web apps to to large, robust sites. (It also had a notion of pipeline transformation of content that was quite slick.)
The Ruby Nitro framework more or less morphed into Ramaze.
(For those curious about Ruby Web framework archaeology dig up a 2nd edition copy of Hal Fulton’s The Ruby Way (2006) and read the Web dev section. Caveat: I wrote the non-Rails parts of that section.)
If you're interested in Rails, I transcribed an interview with DHH about many things, including Rails, which he had with Randal Schwartz on the FLOSS podcast:
"The architecture of Rails is that it's going to be full stack. Which means this is not going to be just one piece and then you have to go out shopping for another ten pieces to build an web application. I wanted something more... you have the entire box. With Rails today, just using Rails and nothing else, you can build an awesome application from the bottom up. That meant including the database, the templating, the MVC structure, bla-bla-bla. The core reason of why I wanted to do this was because I wanted all the pieces to fit together just as well as an integrated Apple stack. Apple products were definitely a leading inspiration for the design of this."
It's pretty amazing how much influence Rails has had on web development, even in ecosystems other than Ruby.
Personally I've found myself fighting Rails when trying to do things in it, but it is one of the tools I started out learning since the number and quality of tutorials out there seem vast. I too owe something to Rails for being of generally good quality.
After a few years of Java and C# (especially in finance) I came really close to leaving the software industry altogether. Ruby, and then Rails, brought me back into it.
They returned the joy and excitement I felt when I first got that ASCII eye to blink from the 250 lines of BASIC I typed in from the back of a magazine.
This is such a key point. I launched a startup in 2003 that was successful, and did it for four years. But at the end of that project I knew that if I had to go back to using a LAMP stack, I was out of the web development industry. Learning Rails brought back my enthusiasm and love for programming.
Rails really hit a sweet spot. It has the right culture and organization to attempt to not go too far off into spaghetti-code land, yet it's also very much about getting things done in the real world rather than writing a bunch of boilerplate junk.
I started using it sometime in about 2005/6 and am still very happy with it.
Heh, in 2005 I was in the audience at PUC - Porto Alegre at FISL and watched it live.. =)
I asked DHH, "So where's the Brazilian Ruby community?" and he kinda mentioned it didn't exist yet. FISL back then was mostly python and java. Damn, it's almost 10 years since I moved to Brazil...
I don't know if it's just me being an old man, but every time I see people fighting with grunt / angular / ember I think of dhh and his "look at what I'm not doing".
[+] [-] jaredcwhite|11 years ago|reply
I think the thing that was so amazing about Rails when it really got popular was that you could build almost any sort of web app you could imagine and everything would just make sense. The full-stack, the conventions, the fact it took much less time to get something working than its competitors...it was SO much easier to build stuff and stop reinventing the wheel.
I can't tell you how many times in the PHP world I had to figure out how to write code to send hand-tuned SQL to the server just to do basic stuff. Obviously, these days you can do cool framework-y full-stack stuff in PHP as well, but in many respects that was a response to the rise of Rails. (Actually, I must admit, I built a PHP 5 framework somewhat inspired by Rails before I jumped onboard the bandwagon...what prompted that was Zend announcing their PHP 5 framework, at which point I figured I'd either drop my framework and go with Zend or...just go with Rails, learn Ruby, and stop fighting it. I'm so thankful I decided to do just that!)
So thank you Ruby, and Rails on your 10-year birthday. You have made this programmer a happy man.
[+] [-] justinzollars|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] diminish|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neduma|11 years ago|reply
True. I know lot of guys made killing with Wordpress, Drupal, Perl, Java. Networking, etc., Career success is nothing to with any particular technology.
[+] [-] abvdasker|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Argorak|11 years ago|reply
Most people don't realize how ground-breaking Rails was back then. It basically went against the common assumption that long up-front setup is just part of the project. I seriously had people complaining that they couldn't bill as much on small projects if that became standard. The 15-minute blog might be a joke today, but back then, it was an awesome way of showing that Rails focused on making things quick to start (I don't like to say easy, it never was).
I am also surprised on how much of the general concepts from the 0.x versions survived. Sure, things have gotten bigger and parts got replaced, but the general structure is still the same.
Thanks for all the effort and love!
[+] [-] kevinwuhoo|11 years ago|reply
https://web.archive.org/web/20050403015716/http://www.rubyon...
[+] [-] 100k|11 years ago|reply
It was fun to research all this stuff. It's interesting to see how far back some of this stuff goes. For example, Rails gets much of its power from Ruby's flexibility. Ruby is heavily inspired by Smalltalk. The first research version of Smalltalk came out in 1972! The MVC pattern was also first developed at PARC, back in 1978.
[+] [-] randall|11 years ago|reply
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Gmail
[+] [-] enraged_camel|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ascendantlogic|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] clairity|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tcopeland|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 100k|11 years ago|reply
Jamis Buck was there: http://weblog.jamisbuck.org/2004/10/2/rubyconf-day-two
Francis Hwang: http://fhwang.net/2004/10/03/RubyConf-2004-Day-2
It's amazing how few people were there and how marginal Ruby was in 2004.
[+] [-] tobinharris|11 years ago|reply
Oddly, I'm starting to think Java might be the future of everything if it can shed it's huge_config.xml + FactoryFactoryFactory obsession, which I believe is happening :)
[+] [-] MrBra|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] avens19|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sfeng|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] julianozen|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nkozyra|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tortilla|11 years ago|reply
Show HN: Ruby on Rails (rubyonrails.org) 220 points by DHH 3 hours ago | flag | 312 comments
[+] [-] ricardolopes|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pavlov|11 years ago|reply
Was Rails the first framework to use this interpretation of MVC? Or did it come from somewhere else?
[+] [-] jamesbritt|11 years ago|reply
I much preferred Nitro to Rails for being more lightweight as well as more amenable to evolving from bare-bones PHP-style single-file Web apps to to large, robust sites. (It also had a notion of pipeline transformation of content that was quite slick.)
George Moschovitis, who created Nitro, ended up moving over to JavaScript. (https://github.com/gmosx/nitro)
The Ruby Nitro framework more or less morphed into Ramaze.
(For those curious about Ruby Web framework archaeology dig up a 2nd edition copy of Hal Fulton’s The Ruby Way (2006) and read the Web dev section. Caveat: I wrote the non-Rails parts of that section.)
[+] [-] jdlshore|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Argorak|11 years ago|reply
http://ad.hominem.org/log/2004/06/tutorial_on_mojavi.php
[+] [-] draegtun|11 years ago|reply
ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struts | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maypole_framework | http://www.perl.com/pub/2004/04/15/maypole.html
[+] [-] johnchristopher|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TenJack|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Luyt|11 years ago|reply
http://www.transcribed-interview.com/dhh-rails-david-heineme...
"The architecture of Rails is that it's going to be full stack. Which means this is not going to be just one piece and then you have to go out shopping for another ten pieces to build an web application. I wanted something more... you have the entire box. With Rails today, just using Rails and nothing else, you can build an awesome application from the bottom up. That meant including the database, the templating, the MVC structure, bla-bla-bla. The core reason of why I wanted to do this was because I wanted all the pieces to fit together just as well as an integrated Apple stack. Apple products were definitely a leading inspiration for the design of this."
[+] [-] Bahamut|11 years ago|reply
Personally I've found myself fighting Rails when trying to do things in it, but it is one of the tools I started out learning since the number and quality of tutorials out there seem vast. I too owe something to Rails for being of generally good quality.
[+] [-] justinweiss|11 years ago|reply
They returned the joy and excitement I felt when I first got that ASCII eye to blink from the 250 lines of BASIC I typed in from the back of a magazine.
And I've never been happier as a developer.
[+] [-] superplussed|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rco8786|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jgalt212|11 years ago|reply
That being said, I don't use Rails. I use Django, but we all owe a debt of gratitude for the path it illuminated.
[+] [-] davidw|11 years ago|reply
I started using it sometime in about 2005/6 and am still very happy with it.
[+] [-] hazelnut|11 years ago|reply
Sad to see it fading away. But to be honest ... I am not using it anymore.
[+] [-] Argorak|11 years ago|reply
http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=ruby%20on%20rails%2C%...
[+] [-] arthurnn|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hoipaloi|11 years ago|reply
I asked DHH, "So where's the Brazilian Ruby community?" and he kinda mentioned it didn't exist yet. FISL back then was mostly python and java. Damn, it's almost 10 years since I moved to Brazil...
[+] [-] jdwyah|11 years ago|reply
I don't know if it's just me being an old man, but every time I see people fighting with grunt / angular / ember I think of dhh and his "look at what I'm not doing".
[+] [-] mef|11 years ago|reply