Java enthusiasts today seems to have a love-hate relationship with Ruby and Ruby on Rails. While there are some who feel it's over hyped, there are others who feel that Rails is the coolest web application development technology of our times. So who better to talk about Ruby on Rails and Java than the creator of ROR, David Heinemeier Hansson.

In this interview with Satish Talim, David talks about the growth of Rails and its features. He also tells us why Rails is relevant to Java developers and something Java developers need to look at right away.

Satish Talim >> Hi David and welcome to IndicThreads. Could you tell us a little more about yourself and your involvement with “Rails?”

David Heinemeier Hansson >> I'm a partner at 37signals. The company behind Basecamp, Backpack, and other successful web applications. With the development of our first application, Basecamp, I chose to use Ruby and began the work on Rails. I basically extracted Rails from Basecamp. So instead of sitting down to think about "what would make a good framework", I created a real application, saw what worked, and put it into the box called Rails.

Satish Talim >> There’s a big buzz around “Rails”, could you give us your thoughts on “What is Rails and how it's “different”?

David Heinemeier Hansson >> Rails is a framework for creating Model-View-Control-based applications along the traditional request/response paradigm. So that makes it very similar to what especially Java people have been doing for a long time. Many of the basic patterns are the same, at least the theory is the same. The implementation and the feel is very different.

"The theory is the same. The implementation and the feel is very different..."

It's difference comes from its embrace of Ruby and its thinking. We're optimizing for happiness by enabling the creation of beautiful code. This optimization manifests itself in principles such as Convention over Configuration where we liberate people from repeating the same mundane decisions over and over again. The stuff that doesn't matter, that you don't care about, and that you'll gladly trade for higher productivity.

Flexibility is often sub-optimization that merely succeeds at making everything equally hard.

"Difference comes from Ruby On Rails' embrace of Ruby and its thinking..."

Satish Talim >> In a very short time, “Rails” has perhaps become the most talked about ‘framework’ around. What do you think are the reasons? Did you see this coming?

David Heinemeier Hansson >> Rails is optimized for programmer happiness. That's a very disruptive notion. The fact that we care about what makes programmers happy allows us to unleash a world of passion. That passion in turn leads to motivation. And motivation is the most powerful productivity booster we have available.

"Rails is optimized for programmer happiness..."

I'm certainly surprised that we've been able to grow this quickly, this fast. But I was fully aware that Rails would be rocking the boat. We've slaughtered a whole farm of holy cows. You can't do that without causing a stir.