Rails

Definitions

1. Ruby on Rails, a full-stack web application framework written in Ruby, extracted by David Heinemeier Hansson from the project-management product Basecamp and released in 2004. Rails is built on two principles: convention over configuration, meaning sensible defaults replace setup files, and don't repeat yourself. It organises applications around the model-view-controller pattern, with Active Record mapping database tables to Ruby classes, schema changes managed as versioned migrations, and RESTful routing tying URLs to controller actions. Generators and scaffolding let a working CRUD application appear in minutes, which made Rails the defining productivity framework of the late 2000s and influenced Django, Laravel, Phoenix, and many others. GitHub and Shopify are among the large applications built on it. Critics point to performance and to magic that obscures what the framework is doing; its maintainers describe the curated, opinionated defaults as omakase.

   In plain English: A web framework for Ruby that lets you build database-backed web applications very quickly by following its conventions — it makes a lot of decisions for you so you can focus on your app.

   Example: "Rails scaffold generated the CRUD app in 30 seconds. The next 6 months were spent on the edge cases."

Related Terms

• Active Record
• Autoload
• Block
• Browser
• Collections
• Convention over Configuration
• Cookie
• .NET
• Phoenix