Ruby on Rails 1.0 is out

Ruby on Rails 1.0 was just released, thus eliminating your last excuse (“It’s not even a stable release!”) for not trying the most buzzword-friendly Web development framework of the year.

For those who have been living under a rock (or, I must admit, for those who have been waiting for SitePoint to write about it), Ruby on Rails is a double-whammy of a programming language (Ruby) and a framework (Rails), which together form a powerful platform for building dynamic Websites quickly.

Ruby on Rails is designed around an agile development methodology, where you start by getting something simple working in a hurry and then build on that core with small changes that gradually produce the finished product. For example, it takes only a few minutes to configure Rails to access your database, from which it can automatically generate a set of pages to view your database records and add/modify/delete records through an administration interface. You can then progressively tweak that auto-generated Web application to get the look and functionality that you want.

Watch for plenty of coverage of Ruby on Rails from SitePoint in the new year. In the meantime, you can peruse SitePoint’s Ruby forum.

One hopes that the overwhelming response to this release, not the Ruby on Rails platform itself, is what’s responsible for its Website having slowed to a crawl…