The Philosophy of Web Application Development with Ruby on Rails

What is Ruby on Rails?

Ruby on Rails is a Rapid Application Development (RAD) framework for building dynamic web applications such as Twitter or 43Things. Ruby on Rails was originally written by David Heinemeier Hansson, commonly referred by his initials DHH, and was first released to the general public in July 2004. Since its initial release Ruby on Rails, also known as Rails, has gain a lot of press, hype, and developer's attention.

Ruby on Rails is built on top of the Ruby programming language. Ruby is a pure object-oriented and dynamic scripting language created by Yukihiro Matsumoto, commonly known in the Ruby community as Matz. Ruby on Rails draws a lot of its dynamic nature from the Ruby programming language itself. Another key strength of Rails is its opinionated nature. David Heinemeier Hansson has referred to rails as 'opinionated software.' Rails has strong opinions about how a web application should be composed and how subsystems should be configured together. Unlike existing Java frameworks which rely on reams of XML configuration files, Rails instead believes in Convention over Configuration. Ruby on Rails replaces the massive XML configuration files by a consistent naming convention and a standard directory location for the different types of files used in a Rails application. As an example of Convention over Configuration, Rails requires that the database tables be named in the plural, such as posts and users, that the primary key in each database table be named id, and that the foreign key from the posts to the user table be named user_id.