Agile Web Development with Rails : ebook

Agile Web Development with Rails
A Pragmatic Guide

Dave Thomas
David Heinemeier Hansson

with Leon Breedt
Mike Clark
Thomas Fuchs
Andreas Schwarz

Ruby on Rails is a framework that makes it easier to develop, deploy, and maintain web applications.

Of course, all web frameworks make the same claim. What makes Rails different? We can answer that question a number of ways. 

One way is to look at architecture. Over time, most developers have moved to a Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture for serious web applications. They find that MVC helps them structure their applications more cleanly. (We discuss MVC in more detail in the next chapter.) Java frameworks such as Tapestry and Struts are based on MVC. Rails is an MVC framework, too. When you develop in Rails, there’s a place for each piece  of code, and all the pieces of your application interact in a standard way. It’s as if you start out with the skeleton of an application already prepared. 

Another way of answering the question is to look at the programming language. Rails applications are written in Ruby, a modern, object-oriented scripting language. Ruby is concise without being unintelligibly terse—  you can express ideas naturally and cleanly in Ruby code. This leads to programs that are easy to write and (just as importantly) are easy to read

months later.