Ruby on Rails

Ruby on Rails is a server-side framework for developing web applications written in Ruby. It is a model-view-controller (MVC) framework that provides default structures to build databases, web services and web pages.

For data transfer it facilitates the use of web standards like JSON/XML and for display and user interfacing the use of HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Rails encourages the use of a variety of well-known software engineering patterns and paradigms as well as MVC. This includes convention over configuration (CoC), don’t repeat yourself (DRY) and the active record pattern.

David Hansson launched the first release in 2004 as an open-source project without sharing the commit rights until 2005. Hansson originally extracted Ruby on Rails whilst working on the project management tool Basecamp. It proved its success when in 2007 Apple agreed to ship the framework with theirMac OS X Leopard and has continued to develop over the years with new upgraded features.

Rails provided many innovative features and its release proved to be vastly influential for web app development in the 2000s. This included features that aimed to help rapid application development, such as seamless database table creations, migrations, and scaffolding of views. Even today many frameworks in other languages borrow ideas off Rails, such as Django in Python, Laravel in PHP, Phoenix in Elixir and Sails.js in Node.js.

Rails provides tools to make common development tasks easier, for example the scaffolding feature can automatically construct modules and views necessary for a basic website. Other tools like WEBrick (a simple web server) and Rake (a build system) work with Rails to provide a basic development environment.

Our development teams have used Rails on a number of projects and would be happy to discuss any potential projects. Check out our list of migrations for more details about how we work.