July 24, 2004

Ruby on Rails open sourced

David Heinemeier Hansson released Rails 0.5.0 — MVC infrastructure extracted from Basecamp.

What it was for

Ruby on RailsRubyA dynamic language emphasizing developer happiness — Rails made it the default for web startups in the 2000s. on Rails is a web framework for database-backed sites — models, views, controllers out of the box. Used to ship CRUD apps fast: project tools (Basecamp), early Twitter/GitHubA platform for Git hosting, pull requests, and CI — the center of open-source collaboration./Shopify, and countless startup MVPs. Convention over configuration means less boilerplate than hand-rolled PHP or JavaA portable language running on the JVM — dominant in enterprise servers, Android, and big data. servlets.

People

  • David Heinemeier Hanssoncreator

Why it's here

Rails popularized convention-over-configuration and made RubyA dynamic language emphasizing developer happiness — Rails made it the default for web startups in the 2000s. a global language for web startups.

Why it mattered

Active Record and Action Pack became the template for modern full-stack web frameworks.

What it solved

Building database-backed web apps required repetitive wiring; Rails packaged opinionated defaults.

Media

  • Ruby on Rails
    ImageRuby on Rails

    Jamie Dihiansan http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2016/1/19/new-rails-identity/2, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

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