Rails Crash Course

Chapter 2. Rails Fundamentals

Ruby on Rails is an open source web framework. Like the Ruby language, it emphasizes programmer happiness and productivity. As you’ll see, it includes sensible defaults that allow you to spend less time dealing with configuration and more time writing code. It also creates a directory structure for your application with a place for every file you need.

Rails was created by David Heinemeier Hansson. He extracted the framework from the project management application Basecamp that he built for 37signals. It was first released as open source in July 2004.

Rails is also a full-stack web framework. This means it contains everything you need to build web applications that accept user requests, query databases, and respond ...