Everything About Ruby on Rails
May 17, 2015
Ruby on Rails is one of the well known web development platforms. Several well known websites like Groupon, Airbnb, Shopify, Bloomberg and other such are developed using Rails. Yes, we all known PHP is a popular web development programming language but apart from PHP, Rails is also slowly developing its market.
As more and more websites are developed on this language, slowly it becomes easy for developers to understand the basics of Ruby on Rails. It consists of an open source eco-system of developers hence if any new web app is being developed, it’s good chance to try developing it on Ruby.
Websites having static data for long term can easily be built using Rails. Just the need is to write plain old HTML in text file and upload it to the web server. On the other hand, if you have an interactive website that needs frequent data alteration then a static HTML page doesn’t serve the purpose. Here, there’s a need of database to store the data for accepting inputs as well as the ability to display different data based on the types and clicks.
What’s a Rails App?
Rails App is a defined set of Files and Folders similar to the one on Macs or Explorer on PCs. Rails apps are classified into models, controllers and views.
- Models: Models serves as the main part of Rails app. Here, the objects are defined and stored.
- Processes: Let’s assume you are developing an eCommerce website using Rails and here you wish to have a separate page for every category say clothes, Shoes etc. For this, some logic is to be written in the model which will determine the different product types.
- Combinations: Models are also used to define relationships among the objects that are available in the app. A book model can be related to the Price model as follows:
One book can have many prices and every book belongs to a specific price. This can be easily explained with the help of models as these can be used to store the data nicely in a perfect place and hence everything becomes easily manageable, accessible and examinable. This leads to more sales and less expenses. - Controllers: The busiest command centres of Rails are known as Controllers that take instructions from users thus transferring them to other parts of the Rails app. This works in a following way:
- User enters its account details to sign in.
- Browser then transfers this data to the respective user’s controller file and this in turn will be transferred to the model and database for password verification.
- After that, the model informs the controller that everything is fine and then this message is further transmitted back to user’s browser and ultimately the user gets the message: Successfully Signed In.
Hence, the main task of the controller is to make sure that the apps’ code is well organized and optimized and every browser request is handled in perfect manner thus resulting into a fastest website that everyone loves to visit.
- Views: An important part of Rails app is views which contains of heavy html coding that decide the page layout. It’s similar to the Mail Merge command in MS Word where one letter is typed and sent to thousands at a go.
However, when there’s a need of dynamic data like as name, address then place holder tags are available to alter that particular data. This means that a simple HTML page can serve the purpose for hundreds of books, there’s no need to write hundred HTML pages for each of them.
Conclusion:
Well, this was the detailed information about Ruby on Rails which serves a great tool for various teams as they are available in different languages. Everyone is easily able to get the code they want and hence the project can be accomplished easily by a team of developers instead of being dependent on a single developer.
The popularity of Rails shows how useful and active it is as it has a good team of developers, enormous code libraries and various services like Heroku which makes web application deployment an easy task.
With this web development framework, one can easily create complex websites quickly, easily and at cheaper rates and for those who aren’t in development field; understanding Rails can add good knowledge to their knowledge bucket. Share on