Rails is growing up

Rails was always the idealistic young teenager of web frameworks. It was opinionated, dynamic and fast. It was ideal for the type of young oppinionated startups that use it as the basis of their business. Adding features and functionality quick was king.

By now it has become second nature to most of us to create cool user interfaces with Ajax and getting a new project up and running in 2 days flat.

Now many of these young startups that grew up with Rails have obviously been hit by the realities of running large scale successful services.

The annoyances of migrating database changes, of upgrading a running production app or breaking your app just by running “gem update”.

All real annoyances tend to strike a nerve in the creativity of the geeks who experience them. So where rails last year revolutionized the rapid development of advanced web apps and earlier this year revolutionized AJAX development, we now have rails revolutionizing application maintenance and production tasks.

Rails 1.0 as far as I can see, is about making a superb development framework into a solid production environment with all the important tasks and workflows handled.

I am very excited about this release. Of course we are still in Release Candidate mode. Rails has had a history of stable 0.×.1 and problematic 0.×.0 releases. The new Release Candidate approach should also help get over this.

Which new things am I most excited about?

• SwitchTower
• Database-agnostic schemas
• Making scripts, environment.rb and Rakefile easier to upgrade
• Plugins
• Fastcgi handler is more production friendly
• Speed
• Better session administration

Congratulations to the Rails team (and to me for leaving J2EE so I can work fulltime with Rails. It also goes without saying that this is great for all the many small web startups who are using Rails.