Hamza Khan-Cheema is a freelance web developer based in London. He specialises in agile web development using Ruby on Rails. He has been involved in web applications for the past 5 years utilising multiple technologies and practices. More...

Ruby on Rails is an open source rapid application web development framework. It lends it self to fast, focused development. As a lot of complexity has been taken away from the developer, this allows developers to concentrate on programming the actual idea and not having to worry about low level details. The methodology used is convention over configuration. Rails lays down a set of rules to follow as opposed to allowing everything to be configured. This allows for faster development and easier maintenance.

Agile web development is a methodology that challenges traditional software practices. In a world where bigger is better, agile development stays true to its definition. It states less people, more incremental changes. It scuff’s its nose at full blown unrealistic functional specifications and replaces it with rapid prototyping and developing screens that the client can actually see and visualise.