Ruby on Rails

What is Ruby on Rails?

• Ruby on Rails, often simply referred to as Rails, is an open source web application framework which runs via the Ruby programming language. It is a full-stack framework: it allows creating pages and applications that gather information from the web server, talk to or query the database, and render templates out of the box
• Ruby on Rails is often installed using RubyGems, a package manager[32] which is included with current versions of Ruby. Many free Unix-like systems also support installation of Ruby on Rails and its dependencies through their native package management system.
• Ruby on Rails is typically deployed with a database server such as MySQL or PostgreSQL, and a web server such as Apache running the Phusion Passenger module.
• Rails is designed to make programming web applications easier by making assumptions about what every developer needs to get started. It allows you to write less code while accomplishing more than many other languages and frameworks.
• Rails combines the Ruby programming language with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to create a web application that runs on a web server. Because it runs on a web server, Rails is considered a server-side, or “back end,” web application development platform
• Rails, as a web development framework, and Ruby, as a programming language, can be used with a choice of operating systems (Linux, Mac OS X, Windows), databases (SQLite, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and others), and web servers (Apache, Nginx, and others).
• The Rails philosophy includes two major guiding principles:
• Don't Repeat Yourself: DRY is a principle of software development which states that "Every piece of knowledge must have a single, unambiguous, authoritative representation within a system." By not writing the same information over and over again, our code is more maintainable, more extensible, and less buggy.
• Convention Over Configuration: Rails has opinions about the best way to do many things in a web application, and defaults to this set of conventions, rather than require that you specify every minutiae through endless configuration files.

Why is Rails So Popular?

• Rails is popular and widely used because its conventions are pervasive and astute. Any web application has complex requirements that include basic functions such as generating HTML, processing form submissions, or accessing a database. Without a web application development framework, a programmer has a mammoth task to implement all the required infrastructure.
• Ruby is known among programmers for a terse, uncluttered syntax that doesn’t require a lot of extra punctuation. Compared to Java, Ruby is streamlined, with less code required to create basic structures such as data fields.
• Ruby’s key advantage is RubyGems, the package manager that makes it easy to create and share software libraries (gems) that extend Ruby.
• The benefit is that every developer who learns the “Rails way” produces a web application that any other Rails developer can unravel and understand more quickly than if they encountered idiosyncratic code without as many conventions. That means collaboration is easier, development is quicker, and there’s a larger pool of open source libraries to enhance Rails.

What are the Benefits of Using Rails?

• Ruby on Rails has a strong and active developer community. There are countless resources that will help host your Rails app -- from freemium up on Heroku to enterprise-level at EngineYard, with many more in between. There are tons of tools out there for monitoring and testing, and lots of Open Source templating tools for the front end. Rails itself upgrades much more frequently than Ruby, so it’s important to make sure your app is up to date.
• Ruby on Rails is easy to obtain, its sources are tried and true, and many questions or issues can be addressed over a message board post or Tweet.
• Ruby on Rails community is full of developers that are constantly improving code and helping others on their projects. This means that if you need a given piece of functionality, there’s every chance that someone else has built something similar before or is willing to help you fix any issues you may have.