Monday, January 28, 2008

I found Rails

Rails. The clever work of a Danish web developer named David Heinemeier Hansson. It was extracted from 37Signals' Basecamp application. An now it is an open source framework.

Rails is a web framework which is powered by Ruby a scripting language. It follows the Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture. Which means there is a separation between data(database/Model), logic(business rules/Controller), and presentation(user interface/View).

It follows the following principles.

  1. Convention over configuration. - You can get up and running without going through the process of repeating the same configurations in your code. All you have to do is to set it once and your done. Configure your database connections and you can use that connection wherever in your code you want.
  2. Don't Repeat Yourself (DRY) – No more copying and pasting the same code. Just define the methods(functions, actions, whatever you may call it) once and use it anywhere in your code. If you want to make changes to your methods then you can just easily change it in one place.
  3. Agile development – Rails follow the Agile development process. It's sort of like more on user demand based approach. List down the initial requirements and layout the basic skeleton of the application. Acquire further requirements suggested by the user and implement those requirements. And the cycle is repeated until an application is acceptable.

The applications of 37Signals are based on Rails like Basecamp, Backpack, and Writeboard. Currently, Rails is now on version 2.0.2. I think Rails 2.0 has more features although I haven't used it yet since I'm still using using version 1.2.3 included in InstantRails.

I hope to get better in Rails and I hope to pound more code in the future.

Peace!

Note: I'm not an expert so some of the terms and ideas that I've wrote here might be incorrect. Feel free to give comments. Thanks!

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