Ruby on Rails 1.0, the official fully baked release of the popular open-source development framework is now available.

David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails (RoR), announced the availability of Ruby on Rails 1.0 on his web log Tuesday.

"Fifteen months after the first public release, Rails has arrived at the big 1.0," Hansson said. "What a journey! We've gone through thousands of revisions, tickets and patches from hundreds of contributors to get here. I'm incredibly proud of the core committer team, the community and the ecosystem we've raised around this framework."

Added Hansson: "Rails 1.0 is mostly about making all the work we've been doing solid. So it's not packed with new features over 0.14.x, but has spit, polish and long nights applied to iron out kinks and ensure that it works mostly right, most of the time, for most of the people.

"Yes, we still have pending tickets, but we will always have pending tickets. If I had accepted that fact back in February, we would probably have been at 2.0 now."

Ruby on Rails framework on track for growth. Click here to read more.

That point was apparent in some of the responses to Hansson's post, as some commenters to the post said they couldn't believe RoR had not yet reached 1.0 because they had been successfully using it for some time.

And one commenter on Hansson's post, identified as "Wjen," said, "I'm really happy this oh-so-important release wasn't rushed at all. I think it's quite important it has most of the bugs weeded out ... and we can all call it stable."

Another commenter, identified as Wolfgang, said, "Congratulations with a great framework and a great product. As a programmer with a PHP background, I'm amazed by Rails capabilities, the constant release of new features, and above all, Ruby's great syntax. Looking forward to future Rails releases, which I hope will continue sporting new trends, just like you guys did with the AJAX [Asynchronous JavaScript and XML] craze."

In an interview with Ziff Davis Internet News over the fall, Hansson, said: "There's a booming commercial ecosystem growing up around Rails."

Hansson, who works with Chicago-based Web software builder 37signals LLC, said with RoR (pronounced "roar"), "In a sense, we're trying to be the Apple of Web application development."

Meanwhile, though RoR has reached the 1.0 milestone, "we've not even begun to think about slowing down. Rails 1.1 is already pretty far along in development and will see some of the biggest upgrades of any Rails release, hopefully some time in February."

In addition to Ruby on Rails 1.0, Hansson said the RoR team debuted a new Web site for RoR that "streamlines and decrufts us into a much cleaner profile that hopefully will make it even easier for people to get excited and try out Ruby on Rails."

More information on RoR is available at www.rubyonrails.org.

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