Pragmatic Creation

I had lunch today with Engine Yard CTO, Tom Mornini and we got chatting about why Rails has become so successful and popular.

We both agreed that it probably isn’t so much Rails itself (though it is an awesome framework that makes things much easier) that is at the core of its success. Instead Rails owes a lot of its success to the following three things:

Agile Culture

Rails tends to go hand-in-hand with Agile development. In fact, as Tom said the venerable Rails book “Agile Development with Rails” (released in 2006) was as much about Agile as it was Rails.

Attention to the User Experience

The 37signals philosophies about usability and design and their extension throughout the Rails community have played a huge part in the evolution of web application development. Rails developers these days are often designers and UX experts as much as they are programmers.  Rails apps are often super sexy and easy to use - but not because they are Rails so much, rather because of the Rails culture that goes along with them.

Community

The Rails community is one of the tightest-knit and prolific communities in web development. Attendance to conferences and events is significantly higher than in other communities and the breadth and dept of open source gems and plugins is astounding. This sense of community strengthens the rails brand and following.