Maybe you've heard about Ruby on Rails, the super productive new way to develop web applications, and you'd like to give it a try, but you don't know anything about Ruby or Rails. This article steps through the development of a web application using Rails. It won't teach you how to program in Ruby, but if you already know another object-oriented programming language, you should have no problem following along (and at the end you can find links on learning
Ruby).
Let's answer a couple of burning questions before rolling up our sleeves to build a web application!
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, and has started to
become popular worldwide in the past few years as more English language books
and documentation have become available.
What is Rails?
Rails is an open source Ruby framework for developing database-backed web
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 could develop a web application
at least ten times faster with Rails than you could 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 is in the Ruby programming language. Many things that are
very simple to do in Ruby are not even possible in most other languages. Rails
takes full advantage of this. The rest of the answer is in two of Rail's
guiding principles: less software and convention over
configuration.
