What is Rails?

What is Rails? Rails is an open source web application framework created by David Heinemeier Hansson. It is written in Ruby and combines HTML, CSS and JavaScripy to create web applications that run on the web server. Since it runs on a web server, it is considered a server-side or back-end web application development platform.

Beacuse Rails is an open source framework, it is easier to build complex websites. Rails is essentially the central project of a large community that produces software libraries. The open commuity supports the development of dynamic websites, web applications and web resources.

Rails is known for several guiding principes that enable rapid development: 1- The DRY principe reduces the amount of code that developers need to write. 2- Convention over configuration- this allows implicit behaviours defined by the rails framwork that you won’t need to specify. It is an exmple of Rail’s opinionated software. Meaning, there is a “rails way” to go about problems that must be solved by a web application developer. This allows for there to be fewer decisions to make because most of what you find is already built. This allows the benefit of faster development and easier maintenance. It is also “an extension of the concept of a default, a setting or value automatically assigned without user intervention”. this saves time because you wont have to spend time setting up configuration files. With less time spent on where things go and what names to assign, developers have found it easier to collaborate. - The RubyGems package manager provides a simple way to install gems. Anyone can upload a gem to the central Ruby gems website, thus becoming accessible to anyone.