Ruby on Rails® for Microsoft Developers

Chapter 2. Understanding Rails

What sets this framework apart from all of the others is the preference for convention over configuration making applications easier to develop and understand.

—Sam Ruby, Apache Software Foundation, Board of Directors

After reading the first chapter you should have a clear mental picture of what Rails is. Unless you encountered unforeseen issues, you should also have your environment properly set up with Ruby, Rails 2.2.2, Mongrel, and SQLite3 with its Ruby bindings.

If you are experiencing difficulties while setting up your environment, feel free to ask for help in the p2p.wrox.com forum for this book. I'll be glad to help you get started.

This chapter delves further into the framework to provide you with more details and a better understanding of its main components and philosophies. Before diving in, though, some common misconceptions about Rails need to be debunked.

Months after I first wrote this chapter, David published a list of Rails Myths. You might consider reading them online at http://www.loudthinking.com/posts/29-the-rails-myths in addition to the ones presented here. This note, of course, was added in during the chapter review phase.