This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz by David Heinemeier Hansson. Original Post: Rails is designed to be boring! Feed Title: Loud Thinking Feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/LoudThinking Feed Description: All about the full-stack, web-framework Rails for Ruby and on putting it to good effect with Basecamp Latest Ruby Buzz Posts Latest Ruby Buzz Posts by David Heinemeier Hansson Latest Posts From Loud Thinking

Naseby is disappointed that Action Pack, and by association Rails, doesn't offer a paradigme shift like Borges or other interesting new approaches to web-development. I'm always sorry to disappoint, but at least this time it's not out of regret. Here's a shocker: Rails is designed to be boring!

I bring no revolutionary, and hardly any evolutionary, ideas to the table with Active Record, Action Pack, and Rails. It's all based on familiar patterns and other peoples great ideas. My humble role has merely been one of selection and simplification. That approach was never going to make the science fair. Or have white papers printed in academic journals. It's just going to make the life of plain old web-developers easier.

Naseby also mentions Basecamp, which serves as a good analogy for Rails. Basecamp took an old concept (project management) and used familiar tools (weblogs, todo lists) to create something, from a perspective of earth-shattering innovations, boring. But the funny thing is that this is exactly what people were looking for.

So I welcome the label of boring. Rails is so boring that you might actually find a use for it in projects you're likely to work on.

P.S.: I do take offence to have Action Pack labelled as a "slightly buffed classic ASP lookalike", but I'll forgive Naseby his premature judgement, and hope he actually takes the time to discover why it is not.