en_dmitriid

In July 2006 CNN Money gave a fellow named David Heinemeier Hansson the 50th place in their list of most influential people in contemporary online business (also known as Business 2.0).

What? You don't know who this fellow is? Well, he is the creator of Ruby on Rails.

Ruby on Rails is an iPod of online technologies:

• 
  Like iPod, Rails doesn't use any new revolutionary technologies:
  
  
  
  • - Ruby itself appeared in 1995
  
  
  • - The MVC (Model-View-Controller) pattern was first described back in 1979
  
  
  
  and so on
  


• 
  Both iPod and Rails, when they appeared, were the cause an unprecedented buzz and discussion.
  


• 
  Rails's fans, much like iPod's fans, are blind to the shortcomings of their favorite toy and are ready to rip any critic to pieces (or worse).
  


• 
  Rails, like iPod, has created numerous clones which are striving to duplicate the functionality without actually introducing any new ideas:
  
  
  
  • - PHP: CakePHP and Zend Framework
  
  
  • - ColdFusion: ColdFusion on Wheels
  
  
  • - .NET: MonoRail
  
  
  • - Perl has Catalyst, though this framewrok isn't originally based on Rails
  
  
  • - Python has TurboGears, though its creator stated that this is not a Rails clone
  
  
  
  

So, why Rails has not only appeared, but also become very popular and eagerly cloned?

I suppose this happened because Rails (and iPod, too) showed us that technology can be humane.

In the case of Rails you can obtain interesting result fast - lightning fast (nonbelievers can check out Rails screencasts). Most of the time you spend in Rails is not fighting databases, or sessions, or files, or anything else, but actually writing the logic of your application.

Additionally, Rails lowers the entry level for the MVC pattern (quite a complex pattern, actually). You simply forget about it, it comes to you naturally.

Rails is, in essence, a ready and sound foundation that let's you build your own house. You may choose either a number of available blocks or just build everything brick by brick. Most other framewroks, on the contrary, have been providing you with either a finished house or with a number of raw materials and a dozer.

So, this David Heinemeier Hansson fella has again proved that no "designed by committee" system/framework (even if this committee is a multi-billion dollar corporation) can ever compete with frameworks that people build for themselves. After all, people know better about their own needs than a committe ever will.

Anyway, I can't wait to see what happens to web technologies 5 years from now. After all, too many developers have accustomed themselves to thу idea of humane technology to ever turn back. I hope.