The Rock in the Pond

Was the Web a different place before Google? It might just be true. You had search engines and content but somehow you could never get what you were looking for because you couldn't exactly search, or search exactly! Google put an end to that, allowing users to talk to the net, for what they wanted, without the pretense of being all things to everyone.

It was the first and still is the best marriage of form to content, and interestingly, when Google first came online, the interface was a big draw and design enthusiasts as well as professionals commented on its Apple like austerity. The fact was, the makers of Google did not know HTML, and just wanted a quick interface (3).

Nevertheless from that hermetic visage, what has spawned, is a whole new way of experiencing the web. Since it became the de facto Yellow Pages for the web, everyone started setting shop and waited to be found. If Microsoft and IE represented the flag bearer of the Web 1.0 world - Standardized, Static, Desktop bound, Google is the masthead for Web 2.0. And more than that, its presence and story have been inspirational to individuals with nothing to show but ideas.

The effect of all this, has been a phenomenal lowering of the entry barriers to putting your 'stuff' online, and virtually, new technologies being born a minute. The impact has been so ruthless in some areas where middlemen operated that there has been literally a wipeout - ask the Air travel ticketing agents, and the Real estate agents! Additionally, participating in this online world was greatly facilitated by other entrants in the scheme of things. Applications that made the web that let you make the "stuff". Sure, Google provided a mechanism to search, but for the new interactive web, what was needed was a relevant form for the tremendous potential. The Wild Wild Web needed Rails. Enter Ruby on Rails.

It is impossible not to notice Ruby on Rails. It has had a huge effect both in and outside the Ruby community... Rails has become a standard to which even well-established tools are comparing themselves to. rubyonrails.org/ -

“Ruby on Rails is a breakthrough in lowering the barriers of entry to programming. Powerful web applications that formerly might have taken weeks or months to develop can be produced in a matter of days.”
-Tim O'Reilly, Founder of O'Reilly Media

Ruby's success has been phenomenal along with some scaling problems, but even then its single most persistent achievement has been its adoption and use by some of the best web 2.0 apps online. There is no doubt there will be better ones to follow, but each successor will only add to the demystification of web programming - and that's a big achievement!