37 Signals began as a Web design consulting firm and branched out into software development at first simply to meet its own needs. It built some internal tools to manage projects. Then it needed a way to communicate with clients, so it opened up parts of its system to them. Before they knew it, they had the makings of a Web-based application.
With four months more work, they turned their software into a service called Basecamp. Launched in February 2004, it quickly became a leader in the parade of new, rich, Web-based applications like Google's Gmail and Flickr.
37 Signals had only one developer, a young whiz named David Heinemeyer Hanssonk. He was keen on working with Ruby, a dynamic object-oriented programming language.
37 Signals set out to create some small programs, not to build an ambitious new platform or application framework. But in the course of building Basecamp, Hansson had written some useful and innovative code that streamlined and simplified the basic chores that all Web applications had to perform in the course of storing and retrieving data. After Basecamp's launch, he and 37 Signals decided to take that work and release it as an open source platform called Ruby on Rails.
Rails, as it came to be called,made writing Web applications easier, in part by limiting the programmer's options. "Flexibility is overrated. Constraints are liberating," Hansson says.
Rails was ready-made for the AJAX-style interface enhancements that were making those Web-based programs credible competition to their desktop equivalents.
- Summarized from
Dreaming in code : two dozen programmers, three years, 4,732 bugs, and one quest for transcendent software by Scott Rosenberg.
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