I was there in mid 2004. I was using Ruby on Rails when its version number was a small decimal. It wasn’t my fault, a few years of PHP is enough to make anyone take the plunge. I set aside a couple of weeks until I got confident and in week three I had my first commercial Rails application built and live. Now four years later, I have never looked back.

At the time, the Rails community was nothing more than 100 hackers hanging around online trying to help each other out with a common goal of writing beautiful code for their applications. Now Rails has become somewhat of a hot topic online. But how did creator David Heinemeier Hansson pull this off? How could one man make such a huge dent in the development of web applications?

At first there was resistance. Rails has always been very firm on how you do things, there is little choice, you do it the Rails way or you’re doing it wrong. And it’s this very controversial approach that has been key to beating the resistance of uptake. It’s amplified the gap. Instead of having a few people who think Rails is alright, you get a mere two types of people, lovers and haters. There is no fence sitting here. These dedicated programmers spoke to their friends and with a strong opinion managed to pull in more Rails recruits.

Then there was denial. Now with a healthy backing of strong opinioned Rails hackers, Rails was starting to show up on respected industry sites like SlashDot in early 2005. The word was starting to spread. Along with outrageous claims like “Rails will make you 10 times as productive”. If anyone told me that, damn straight I’d deny it too.

Then there were copycats. Slowly but surely programmers in other languages started to work out that Rails was exactly what they were looking for. So what did they do? They took the architecture of the Rails framework and wrote it in the language of their choice. CakePHP for PHP cropped up in 2005, then Pylons for Python and even Microsoft is starting to show some similarities with their latest ASP.NET MVC framework. They always have said imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

Then came the large start-ups. Start-ups took the risk and capitalised on the ability to start from the beginning in Rails. And boy did they ever! Sites like twitter.com, 43things.com and odeo.com were bang on the money. But the enterprise still resisted. No one ever got fired for choosing Microsoft right?

And here comes the enterprise. In 2006 and 2007, Rails got really bagged for not being able to scale. Now sites like twitter.com, which was recorded in 2008 to handle over 3 million twitter messages a day, you can’t doubt that Rails can and does truly scale.

But the hosting environment Rails needed has always been a good excuse not to use Rails. If your web framework doesn’t run on a standard open source enterprise web server like Apache, the enterprise isn’t going to even notice you.

But that issue is now solved too. Recently mod_rails was released, a module that allows you to run Rails properly on Apache, and is what I believe is going to see a frenzy of growth in the uptake of Rails in the enterprise. David HH said himself “This could become very popular, very fast!” and he’s absolutely right.

Rails is now, in 2008, being used by some seriously big names, Amazon.com, The BBC, IBM, Apple Computer, yellowpages.com and NASA to name a few. And it’s grown around the world with Rails development companies setting up shop just about everywhere.

It’s been a long hard push uphill to bring Rails to the enterprise and there is a long way to go yet, but both feet are well in the door.