In 2008, during my bachelor year project, me and my friends decided to create a web application. We were very new to web development and did not know about different web technologies. So, we decided to use php for creating our project. We had to create our own folder structure, struggle with database setup and set up lot of plugins manually.
Later when I learned about Rails, I was really fascinated about how our lives would have been lot easier if we had learned about the technology before. Rails is a web development framework which uses Ruby as its programming language. It has its own folder structure and conventions. So, when using rails one does not have to worry about anything. A single rails command and it does everything by itself. Isn’t is wonderful? In rails there are gems which are the libraries. The gems are packages which are open source and can be used easily in a rails application. Different gems can be easily found in ruby gem’s website.
Moreover, Rails follows MVC (Model, View and Controller) architecture. Models deals with data and database. View displays the contents of the website. Finally, controller connects the model and view. It’s the job of the controller to control both the model and the view.
There are really good tutorials on rails, you can easily find them in:
Welcome to the “Rails World”.