Skylight Integrations

Over the past two decades, Rails has taken countless companies to millions of users and billions in market valuations. Over six thousand people have contributed code to Rails, and many more have served the community through evangelism, documentation, and bug reports. Rendering HTML templates, updating databases, sending and receiving emails, maintaining live pages via WebSockets, enqueuing jobs for asynchronous work, storing uploads in the cloud, providing solid security protections for common attacks. Databases come to life with business logic encapsulated in rich objects. Modeling associations between tables, providing callbacks when saved, encrypting sensitive data seamlessly, and expressing SQL queries beautifully. Controllers expose the domain model to the web, process incoming parameters, set caching headers, and render templates, responding with either HTML or JSON.

Wondering why Ruby is so popular? Its fans call it a beautiful, artful language. And yet, they say it’s handy and practical. Since its public release in 1995, Ruby has drawn devoted coders worldwide. In 2006, Ruby achieved mass acceptance. With active user groups formed in the world’s major cities and Ruby-related conferences filled to capacity. Ruby-Talk, the primary mailing list for discussion of the Ruby language, climbed to an average of 200 messages per day in 2006. It has dropped in recent years as the size of the community pushed discussion from one central list into many smaller groups. Ruby is ranked among the top 10 on most of the indices that measure the growth and popularity of programming languages worldwide (such as the TIOBE index). Much of the growth is attributed to the popularity of software written in Ruby, particularly the Ruby on Rails web framework.