What is Ruby on Rails Framework?

Ruby on Rails Framework is a concept designed to construct web applications, sites, blogs etc. It is rather popular among developers due to simplicity and consistency.

History

In 2003 David Heinemeier Hansson has created Ruby on Rails, but extended and released it firstly on July 2004 as an open source. However, he has shared commit rights only on February 2005. The framework got recognition on August 2006, when Apple announced about shipping Ruby on Rails with Mac OS X v10.5. First, official 1.0 version was released in December, 13 2005. Years of development and researches resulted in release of 2.3 version on March, 2009. It was a brand new concept with number of new features such templates, engine, and new Rack and nested model forms. After launching Merb web application framework on December, 2008 developers of Ruby on Rails announced about willing to cooperate with Merb developers in order to ship best features of Merb with Rails. As a result Merb was merged into Rails, which resulted in release of Ruby on Rails 3.0.

In 3.1 version reversing database migrations and the asset pipeline were implemented.

The last version is 3.2. It was released on January20, 2012.

Rails in detail

The main advantage of Rails is that development could be done very quickly, things that will take to do hours on ASP.net and Java are done in 15 minutes on Rails. It is also can run on all popular operating systems: Windows, Macintosh, and Linux. Finished projects are maintained easily. Framework’s structure is designed to provide quick and functional solutions for developer. Well, if you are not concerned to process every pixel on your web-site or blog, it is the fastest concept to use. If you want to talk about disadvantages, there are not much of them, but they are reasonable. One to be mentioned is that Rails doesn’t support some of the database features like “Stored procedure” and number of others.

Why Ruby on Rails?

Mentioned above advantages were appreciated by number of heading companies no matter if it is an ordinary company or software outsourcing company. Here is the brief list:

Basecamp
Twitter
Shopify
Yellow Pages
Github
Lighthouse
Groupon

Conclusion

So what can we say about Ruby on Rails? It is functional, well-designed and consistent framework intended to decrease efforts of developers. If you are a beginner in web-developing and software testing or if you are thinking of changing framework, you should think about Ruby on Rails.

Before defining the best way to learn Ruby on Rails it is necessary to find out more information this concept. Ruby on Rails is an open source web application framework, running on Ruby programming language. It was founded by David Heinemeier Hansson in 2003 and is being developed throughout these years. The last version is 3.2, it was released in January 20, 2012. About history, essence and implementation of framework you can know more from our article “What is Ruby on Rails framework”