The year was 2007. I was about to leave corporate America and try my first startup. I had been a Java architect for the past 10+ years and was ready to try something new. A friend of mine introduced me to a framework called “Ruby on Rails.” She said it was amazing how fast you could build stuff. Here is a link to the original “How to build a blog engine in 15 minutes with Ruby on Rails” video where David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) shows us how to build a blog using Rails. After watching the video, I was sold that it was worth a try. I spent most of the next year building my startup primarily programming in Ruby on Rails. It took me a while to climb the fairly steep learning curve of Rails, and also to really learn the Ruby programming language, but once I did, I could build stuff faster than at any point in my 20+ year career. Rails has a doctrine of what makes it great; you can look at the nine items here. Looking back, what made Rails great for me personally was a handful of key things:
- Convention over Configuration – Now most frameworks follow this paradigm, but Rails was the first to bring it to the masses. No more struggling with configuration files to get your environment set up properly, everything works right out of the box, and if you follow the rules, it’s painless.
- DRY Coding – (Do NOT repeat yourself) – The idea here is that you only need to code something in one place to get it done. You don’t need to copy and paste code into five different places to get something to work.
- Developer Happiness & Productivity – Rails came with generators to get you started. They would create all the code you need to CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) your resources. Rails also came with a handy console where you could test and debug your code in a full working environment. You could also code everything in one language, Rails provided helpers to generate most of the JavaScript you would need. Rails eliminated the multiple layers upon layers of coding you used to have to do to get something done.
- True Reuse – We have been looking for the ability to reuse code for 20+ years. We have tried many different approaches, but Rails, because it is a complete ecosystem, has done the best job at it. When you are building an app, you can find a “gem” (which is a library) to do just about anything you want. For example, authentication, authorization, uploading files, paginating results – all these things come for free by using “gems” that are open source.
- Majestic Monolith – For most of the applications we build, having a fully integrated, simple, coherent platform, and structure is the easiest way to build things. Sure, microservices and serverless have their place, but for 80% of the applications out there, having everything set up in one platform is the easiest way to construct software. Rails comes with all you need to build your User Interface, API, business logic and database.
Also worth noting is that Enterprise Java was the “state of the art” application architecture before Rails. The architecture of Enterprise Java looked something like this: