To me, given the plethora of web programming languages, the emergence of Ruby on Rails (RoR) as an eminent web development platform seemed like yet another good marketing strategy at work. However, after careful analysis of features provided by RoR, I recognized that my assumption was wrong.Now I believe that RoR has realized its rightful place as the new agile web development platform and in future we will be seeing more RoR-based applications around.

RoR is a ruby-based framework and it operates on two major principles. The first principle is Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY). The implications of this principle are quite clear. RoR favors reusability of components at its very core, thus making it easier to manage code. The second principle of RoR is Convention Over Configuration (COC). This means that RoR relies heavily on conventions instead of configuration files. This principle allows RoR to generate various models automatically that we will be discussing shortly.

RoR also implements MVC (Model View Controller) for all its applications. MVC is a design pattern and it provides a clear segregation of data, application logic and presentation tiers. The data in the MVC model is represented by Model, application logic by Controller and the presentation by View.

Given the basic principles of RoR, and its implementation of MVC, it is very easy to create very complex web applications using simple commands in the ruby environment. It minimizes the development effort of the programmer while conforming to high object-oriented principles. And the most beautiful part is … it is open source!!

For the sake of brevity, I have spared the details on this topic for my coming posts. If you guys are interested, we can start out a series of articles covering application development in RoR from a beginner’s level.

More to follow later….