Learning Ruby

Chapter 11. A Short Guide to Ruby on Rails

Ruby on Rails (http://www.rubyonrails.org) is an open source web development framework for creating database-enabled web applications without all the usual agony. It is written in Ruby, and, as I mentioned in Chapter 1, Matz calls it Ruby’s “killer app.”

Rails lets you build complex web sites quickly and easily, because you can let Rails do a truckload of work for you. On the other hand, all the work Rails does is relatively transparent, so it is easy to take as much control as you want. After some introductory remarks, you’ll find a Rails tutorial at the end of the chapter.

Where Did Rails Come From

The private, Chicago-based company 37signals (http://www.37signals.com) was founded by Jason Fried in 1999. The company makes web-based applications, such as Basecamp for project management (http://www.basecamphq.com) and Backpack, a nifty organizational tool (http://www.backpackit.com). 37signals asked David Heinemeier Hansson (or DHH) to write Basecamp in PHP. He had met Matz at a conference when he was a student and really liked what Ruby had to offer. He preferred to write Basecamp in Ruby over PHP, and the 37signals folks let him do it his way. The rest, as they say, is history.

After he finished writing the code, DHH started extracting base code out of Basecamp to use with another project, Ta-da Lists (http://www.tadalist.com). He later turned that code into an open source project (MIT license) and called it Ruby on Rails.

Rails version 0.5 ...