What the hell is it? Ruby is just another language like PHP, JSP, and C++. Rails is a web application framework written in the Ruby programming language. Rails allows you become more efficient by eliminating boring repetitive work. Here’s a quote from the philosophy section for Ruby on Rail in WikiPedia…
Ruby On Rails’ guiding principles include “Don’t Repeat Yourself” (DRY) and “Convention Over Configuration.”
“Don’t Repeat Yourself” means that definitions should only have to be made once. Since Ruby On Rails is a “full-stack” framework, the components are integrated so that bridges between them need not be set up manually. For example, in Active Record, class definitions need not specify the column names; Ruby already can find them from the database itself, so defining them in both the program and the RDBMS would be redundant.
“Convention Over Configuration” means that the programmer only needs to define configuration which is unconventional.
For example, if there is a Post class in model, the corresponding table in the database is posts, but if the table is unconventional (e.g. blogposts), it must be specified manually (set_table_name “blogposts”).
Sounds cool, huh? Here are more links if you want to learn more about Ruby on Rails…
Good overview of RoR
WikiPedia
Videos of RoR in action…
Interview with RoR’s creator, David Heinemeier Hansson
Good place to start learning Ruby (fun site!)
More RoR links…
