The last year has been a period of intense development for the Rails team. Yesterday, they announced the release of version 1.0 of their open source web application framework.

If you’re not familiar with Rails or Ruby on Rails — and really, where have you been? — it’s a simple framework for setting up database-driven applications in the browser. RoR applications generally use less code and a simpler structure than previous generations of database applications. Plus, Ruby and Ajax work well together, giving a whole new feel (fast!) to the front end of database queries. Check out Paul Adams’ tutorial on Ruby on Rails at Webmonkey.

In addition to the release of Rails 1.0, the team has launched a new website at rubyonrails.org.