Introduction to Ruby on Rails

In my last post, I talked about installing Ruby on Ubuntu. Ruby existed long before Rails came into existence, however, rails made ruby more popular.

This demonstration by https://twitter.com/@dhh made rails very popular among the ruby developers. David was working on the code base for Basecamp, a project management tool by 37signals, later he extracted the codebase and released it as open source with the name of project Ruby on Rails. Since it's first release in 2003, it has successfully closed 20,040 pull requests at the time of this writing.

Ruby on rails has evolved as a first choice framework for most of the startups as it is very easy to get started and focus on building the product than focusing on how to build the product. Thanks to its convention over configuration nature, it has become easier to get familiar with the codebase of any other projects written on ruby on rails.

Ruby on rails is built around MVC(Model View Controller).
Meaning requests first come to the controller, the controller finds and renders appropriate views and interact with model, model interacts with the database and sends response back to controller which then sends the response to the view which is displayed on the users screen.

To get started with Ruby on Rails, we first need to install it. Installing ruby on rails is as easy as installing any other gem.

gem install rails

This will install the latest rails version available at the time.