Where Do Ruby /Ruby on Rails 4 and PHP /Symfony 2 Come From?

Are you looking for a programming language to implement your web application in? Perhaps you’re a bit confused about which language is right for your project.

The first step to determining a suitable language for your web development project is to learn a bit about the most popular languages and frameworks that power modern websites.

Today’s article will offer a short overview of the Ruby and PHP programming languages. We’ll also discuss the importance of frameworks, and will take a look at the Ruby on Rails 4 and Symfony 2 frameworks.

What is Ruby?

Appearing in 1995, Ruby was created by Yukihiro Matsumoto of Japan. Matsumoto felt a need for an object-oriented yet easy-to-use scripting language. The philosophy behind Ruby is to make programming productive and fun by placing human needs above computer needs. By carefully blending parts of the Perl, Smalltalk, Lisp, Eiffel and Ada languages, Matsumoto struck a balance between functional and imperative programming. He succeeded in making Ruby not so much simple (it’s actually a very complex language), but rather natural.

Since launching over two decades ago, Ruby has been actively updated and improved. Within a few years of its debut, Ruby started gaining popularity outside of Japan. The introduction of Ruby Gems in 2004 allowed people to write third-party libraries and programs that can be used in applications, and this is how Ruby on Rails was born in 2005.

Ruby on Rails made development a lot faster. It also offered a Model-View-Controller structure and three development approaches that prove quite handy for web developers: "convention over configuration," DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself), and "Fat models, skinny controller." No wonder the whole Ruby community was talking about Ruby on Rails.

In fact, the new Rails framework made the Ruby language so popular that Mac OS X began shipping with it in 2007.

After 18 years of development Ruby 2.0.0 was released in February 2013. The 2.0 release brought numerous improvements and was adopted quickly, further confirming that Ruby is one of the most popular and wanted languages on the market. The future of this language looks very promising.

Read more at rubygarage blog https://rubygarage.org/blog/history-of-ruby-on-rails-vs-symfony-2

Sviatoslav Andrushko is a content manager at RubyGarage. Sviat adores writing about web development, web design, testing, and other IT-related topics.