Ruby on Rails® for Microsoft Developers

2.3. Rails' Standard Packages

When you installed Rails in the first chapter, aside from the main Rails gem, several other gems were installed. All of these libraries together compose what is considered to be the Ruby on Rails framework. They are:

• ActiveRecord: The M of the MVC triad, which provides Object-Relational mapping for several RDBMS, as previously discussed.

• ActionPack: A very large library that handles the whole request-response cycle. It is composed of the ActionController library (the C of MVC) and the ActionView library (the V of MVC).

• ActionMailer: A small framework that adds email support to Rails applications. This can be used whenever the need for email notification arises, like in the case of sign ups or forgotten password requests. It greatly simplifies the process of sending out emails from Rails, and as such, can also be used to set up an admin notification every time the Rails application raises an exception.

• ActiveSupport: A series of utility classes and Ruby's Standard Library extensions used by Rails and in Rails applications.

• ActiveResource: A library that connects business objects to Representational State Transfer (REST) Web Services. Chapter 10 covers this subject in greater detail.