What Is Ruby on Rails & Why You Should Use it for Your Web Application

Today, Ruby on Rails (a.k.a RoR) powers an impressive number of websites and web applications, like Basecamp, Shopify, and Scribd, just to name a few. But what exactly is Ruby on Rails? How does it work? Why should you use it? Let’s take a look at how to get started with Ruby on Rails and why it’s the best option for web developers everywhere!

Why Use Ruby on Rails (RoR)?

When building a web application, there are many factors to consider before making a final decision. Today, we’ll walk you through some of these considerations and explain why RoR should be your choice if you want to build applications in a high-performing, scalable and robust way. Here are three key reasons why using RoR is a good idea.

These features make RoR an excellent choice for developing websites that require real-time interaction between different users, as well as for creating online stores with transactional functionality. If you have questions about how Ruby on Rails developers can help your company develop an online presence or support your existing website, don’t hesitate to contact us! We’re here to help!

What Does Rails Do?

One of Rails’ great strengths is its convention over configuration mentality, which means that by default, most everything works as you would expect. This gives you tremendous flexibility to just dive right in and start coding. Although some might argue that convention over configuration can lead to repetitive code if you aren’t careful, it makes development fast and easy. And when starting a new project or adding a new feature to an existing one, speed counts. In fact, many developers say they choose Rails because of how quickly they can get started building their web application.

How Rails Works?

It’s All About ActiveRecord: Rails’ ActiveRecord is one of its standout features, though in practice it can be a little complicated. In an app, each table translates to a class that inherits from ActiveRecord and contains all of your business logic. The real magic here happens with associations, though. For example, if you have a User model that has many posts and belongs_to a Post model. This allows you to call user.posts and get back an array of post objects—all without writing any additional code. This makes writing complex queries very easy, as long as they follow certain rules.

In addition to ActiveRecord, Rails also includes ActionPack, ActionMailer, ActionController (and several other Action classes), which are used together to make up what’s known as MVC architecture—or Model-View-Controller architecture.

Overview of Ruby on Rails Architecture

Ruby on Rails (abbreviated as RoR or simply Rails) is an open-source web application framework written in Ruby. As a full-stack framework, RoR handles both parts of a web application: The front end and back end. In general, developers use RoR to create database-backed web applications using RESTful APIs and HTML/HAML templates. It’s also used to build mobile apps with iOS, Android and Windows Phone support.

A Brief History of Ruby on Rails: RoR was developed by David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) in 2004 when he was working at Basecamp. DHH created RoR because he wanted to move away from PHP—at that time, PHP was still considered hackish—and find something better suited for web development.

What is Ruby And Rails Used For

Before we get into what ruby and rails are used for, let’s first talk about both of these technologies individually. Ruby is a programming language that was created in 1995 by Yukihiro Matsumoto, or Matz. Since its creation, there have been many improvements made to make working with ruby even easier. One of these improvements includes adding object-oriented capabilities to simplify complex tasks within programs, among other things. This new version of ruby became known as Ruby on Rails (or RoR). So, now that you know what Ruby is, let’s discuss why you should use it for your web application.

Benefits of Using Ruby on Rails

Here’s a quick rundown of why you should use RoR to develop your next web application: The framework is free and open source. It’s an intuitive language that can be learned by developers with experience in other languages like Java, PHP, Python or Perl. Dynamic programming is easier with RoR, which offers greater productivity than other platforms do. It’s safe and secure to use (if properly configured), and it has high concurrency capacity for large projects.

Conclusion

Well, that was fun. Now that you’ve learned about some of your favorite new development tools and programming languages, start playing around with them! Don’t worry if what you make is a little janky at first. Learning by doing is how all great devs learn, after all. And don’t forget to share what you’re making with your friends and family, and even strangers!