What is Ruby on Rails?
Ruby on Rails , also known as “Rails”, is a web application development framework written in the Ruby language. Rails uses a modelviewcontroller (MVC) structure to organize application programming. Rails has major principles like Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY), Convention Over Configuration (CoC) and active record pattern. You have likely already used many of the applications which are developed with Ruby on Rails: Basecamp, GitHub , Twitter , Shopify, SoundCloud, Zendesk, Square, etc. Those are just big names but thousands of applications have been built with the Rails framework since its release in 2004. David Heinemeier Hansson , inventor of Ruby on Rails framework, extracted Rails framework from his work on the project management tool Basecamp. He released Rails as open source in July 2004, but did not share commit rights to the project until February 2005. In December 2005, Rails Version 1.0 was released. Ruby on Rails is supported by many databases like SQLite , MySQL , PostgreSQL , etc. Rails framework comes with a great many packages, like active record, action mailer, active support, gems, etc. Rails has one out of the box feature, called scaffolding , which is used for creating CRUD operation very quickly for any web application. WEBrick is a ruby server which comes with Rails framework by default. We can also configure many servers with Rails, like Apache, nginx, etc. Ruby on Rails is also installed using RubyGems , a package manager for the Ruby programming language that provides a standard format for distributing Ruby programs. There are hundreds of open source contributors, blogs, forums and IRC channels available for Rails. A huge number of gems are available in the market for Rails application.