Now what is this? When I first heard of it, it sounded to me like a story title; the name seemed to have no connection with technology, whatsoever. Surprisingly, Ruby on Rails is being talked about on weblogs and technology sites as the web technology framework that web developers should watch out for. We take a quick look on what it has in the offering.

Ruby is an object-oriented programming language similar to Perl, Python or PHP. Created by Yukihiro Matsumoto, the language originated in Japan in the early 1990's and is a cross between Perl and Python. Though some of us may just ignore it as 'just another programming language' programmers who have developed using Ruby boast of its ease of use and powerful syntax.

Ruby is currently available to the developers under the open source model and is free to use, modify and distribute. Quite similar to Java, Ruby is a complete object-oriented language and data in it can be represented as objects. The language is highly portable and though developed using Linux it can work on UNIX, DOS, Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP, MacOS, BeOS, OS/2 operating systems. The stable release of Ruby currently available is Ruby-1.8.4 and can be downloaded from here. 

Developed by David Heinemeier Hansson, lead programmer of 37Signals, Rails is a web application framework written using Ruby programming language, hence often referred to as 'Ruby on Rails'. Being a web application framework, Rails provides all the functionalities required by a web application in the form of reusable components simplifying the work of a web programmer.

According to the official Rails website, the framework offers a full-stack for developing database-backed web applications. It uses AJAX in the view; request and response model in the controller; and domain model wrapping in the database. To develop real world applications one needs to add a database and a web server.

The Rails framework can work with a range of web servers and databases, Apache and lighttpd are the most recommended. MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, Oracle, SQL Server, DB2, or Firebird are the choices available on the database front.

For instance, the Rails framework provides a database access library called ActiveRecord that can be used to connect and interact with a backend SQL database from within an application. The ActiveRecord layer allows to present the data from database rows as objects and embellish these data objects with business logic methods.

Other pre-written libraries provided by Rails include – form data validation, application templates, email sending and receiving, date and time formatting and manipulation, session and cookie management, and interactive client-side functionality in web pages with AJAX.

The Rails framework is available under the open source license, and its core maintainer is David himself. Web developers who program using Rails claim that it can significantly power-up the development process reducing development time to one-tenth. Read more about Ruby on Rails API, here. 

Though Rails has become quite a rage amongst web developers and is seeing lot of traction, it is in its nascent form to be used for developing commercial applications that can be deployed as services across websites. Going by the developer feedback, Rails is a well thought-out web development framework and significantly reduces the barriers of entry to programming. To download your copy of Ruby on Rails, click here.

Have you used Ruby on Rails framework to develop web applications? Do you think it has the potential of being the best of the breed? Do mail us your feedback.