Ruby on Rails is a recent entry into the world of Web application development that is rapidly gaining mindshare, even while still in beta versions. Rails succeeds by automating the creation of the most common types of Web applications while not straightjacketing you if you want to add custom or atypical requirements. Moreover, compared to many Free Software libraries that perform individual aspects of a Web application, Rails contains a nicely integrated set of tools for all aspects.
Ruby on Rails is taking Web development by storm. Let’s start with a refresher on the underlying technologies:
- Ruby is the free, simple, straightforward, extensible, portable, interpreted scripting language for quick-and-easy object-oriented programming that, like Perl, sports many features to process text files and perform system-management tasks.
- Rails is a full-stack, open source Web framework in Ruby for writing real-world applications with more ease and less code.
Being a full-stack framework means that all layers in Rails are built to work together so you don’t repeat yourself and can use a single language from top to bottom. Within Rails, everything (templates to control flow to business logic) is written in Ruby. Rails favors reflection and runtime extensions over configuration files and annotations.
This article details the components of Rails and shows you how it works.[Read More]
