Rails

Rails or Ruby on Rails is a server-side web application framework written in Ruby. It is a Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework, providing default structures for a database, a web service, and web pages. It encourages and facilitates the use of web standards such as JSON or XML for data transfer, and HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for display and user interfacing.

History

Rails was created in 2003 by David Heinemeier Hansson while working on the code base for Basecamp, a project management tool by 37signals. Rails was first released to the public in July 2004. It was met with acclaim in the web development community and has since been one of the most popular web application frameworks.

Principles

Rails is known for its "convention over configuration" philosophy. This means that the programmer does not have to spend a lot of time configuring files in order to get setup, Rails comes with a set of conventions which help speed up development.

Another pillar of Rails philosophy is Don't Repeat Yourself (DRY). 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.

Components

Rails is composed of several components, including:

• Action Pack: Handles the web requests, routing, and view and controller processing.
• Active Record: An ORM framework for handling database interactions.
• Action Mailer: A framework for designing email services.
• Active Job: A framework for creating background jobs.
• Action Cable: A framework to integrate WebSockets with Rails to create real-time applications.

See also

• List of web frameworks
• Comparison of web frameworks
• Ruby (programming language)