Foreword by Martin Fowler

The world of web application development has been given quite the shake in the past couple of years by the rise of Ruby on Rails. Many famous names (or incessant loudmouths) who are well known in the Java world have become strong advocates of Ruby and Rails—even to the point of leaving the Java world for good.

I've been using Ruby for many years, and I'm a big advocate of the language. It focuses on a clear but simple syntax that I find captures my intentions much more clearly than the mainstream curly brace languages. It's fully object oriented and has powerful language features such as closures. In particular, it offers a wide range of tools for metaprogramming and creating domain-specific languages. These features underpin Rails—making it much easier to create such an influential web framework.