Ruby & Rails

What is Ruby?

Ruby is a pure object-oriented programming language with a super-clean syntax that makes programming elegant and fun. Ruby successfully combines Smalltalk's conceptual elegance, Python's ease of use and learning, and Perl's pragmatism. Ruby originated in Japan in the early 1990s. It has become popular worldwide in the past few years as more English-language books and documentation have become available (and its popularity has really taken off since the introduction of Rails!).

What is Rails?

Rails is an open source Ruby framework for developing web-based, database-driven applications. What's special about that? There are dozens of frameworks out there, and most of them have been around much longer than Rails. Why should you care about yet another framework?

What would you think if I told you that you can develop a web application at least ten times faster with Rails than you can with a typical Java framework? You can--without making any sacrifices in the quality of your application! How is this possible?

Part of the answer lies in the Ruby programming language. Rails takes full advantage of Ruby. The rest of the answer is in two of Rails' guiding principles: less software and convention over configuration.

Less software means you write fewer lines of code to implement your application. Keeping your code small means faster development and fewer bugs, which makes your code easier to understand, maintain, and enhance. Very shortly, you will see how Rails cuts your code burden.

Convention over configuration means an end to verbose XML configuration files--there aren't any in Rails! Instead of configuration files, a Rails application uses a few simple programming conventions that allow it to figure out everything through reflection and discovery. Your application code and your running database already contain everything that Rails needs to know!