Framework · 2004–now · Web Boom
Ruby on Rails
Convention over configuration. Taught a decade of frameworks how to ship MVPs — and how to hit scaling walls.
Rails stuck by making the first 80% of CRUD absurdly fast for startups who needed revenue, not patterns. Scaling pain is real but survivable with money and discipline. It failed as "the only stack" but wins wherever shipping speed beats microservice cosplay.
Case studies
Patterns
Context
The browser ate the desktop
The web became the default delivery surface. LAMP and Rails made shipping cheap; Ajax made pages feel like apps; SOAP/SOA tried to enterprise-ify the wire. REST won by being debuggable with curl. This decade invented the modern product cadence — and the habit of treating every new framework as destiny.
Compare with
Related
Framework · 2005–now
Django
Batteries-included Python web. Still the adult choice when you want an admin, auth, and ORM that behave.
Architecture · 1998–now
LAMP
Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP — the cheap, fast path to a website. Mutated into countless managed stacks.
Architecture · 2004–now
MVC web frameworks
Model-view-controller as the default web shape. Still how most server-rendered apps think.
Framework · 2007–now
Sinatra
Minimal Ruby routing for apps that did not need all of Rails. DSL elegance in a few hundred lines.