Evolution of Rails
Lakshan Perera
LK Ruby User Group – September 2009

Ruby is not Rails!
But, Rails is Ruby...

MINSWAN
(Matz is nice, so we are nice)

The journey of 5 years...

“Build your blog
in 15 minutes” Era
A Danish boy becomes a hacker.
A Design agency becomes an
application company.
Convention over Configuration
DRY principle

“Rails can't scale” Era
(Phusion Passenger, Message Queues, MemCache and etc)

“Rails is a Ghetto” Era
(Rise of Merb)

If Rails is a Ghetto,
Merb is its' whorehouse

The Great Reunion!

Rails == Magic ?
No! It is pure Ruby...

Metaprogramming
- Module.class_eval
- Object.instance_eval,
- Kernel.eval

Blocks/Lambdas

Symbols & Nice Literals

Rack
Rack provides a minimal interface
between web servers supporting Ruby
and Ruby frameworks.
Cool Middlewares : Rack-Bug, Authentication (Warden), CloudKit

The Future
Rails 3
- Better Modularity
- Framework Agnostic
- Public API
(No Monkeypatching)

Easy Responders
(Inherited Resources)

ActiveModel

Sneak Peak
LightRecord

ORM for key-value stores
Supports any key-value store that has a Moneta interface.
(e.g. MongoDB, CouchDB, TokyoCabinet, Redis, Hash)
ActiveModel Compatible
Includes Validations, Callbacks, State Machines, Timestamps
Basic Container Associations (similar to Has Many relationship)
Released Soon!

Questions ?