Ruby on Rails has received a lot of buzz among the web developer community, but many wonder exactly what the fuss is all about. In this high order bit from the 2005 O'Reilly Open Source Convention, developer David Heinemeier Hansson explains the secrets behind the success of Ruby on Rails.
Rails is an integrated stack of web frameworks, but Hansson says that really it's "a bunch of stuff that makes web developers happy." Coupled with the the programming language Ruby, there are three reaons why Rails is a superior tool: convention over configuration, instant change and a complete, integrated and familiar stack.
Hansson also addresses some of the aspects of Ruby that critics claim are faults. He explains how using a more structured framework makes for better applications, since developers are able to focus more on the end product rather than being distracted by the flexibility of the infrastructure.
David Heinemeier Hansson is a programmer and evangelist of Less Software. He's the creator of applications like Instiki, Basecamp, and Ta-da, and works with the open source community and design extraordinaires 37signals. Since its release in late July 2004, he's also been leading the development of Ruby on Rails, a web application framework and environment for building real-world applications with joy and less code than most frameworks spend doing XML sit-ups.
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