You've probably heard of Ruby on Rails at this point. And you may have seen Web hosts offering support for Ruby on Rails. But perhaps you're not yet familiar with what Ruby is, what Rails is, and how exactly one happens to be on the other.
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If you're not a developer yourself, then certainly you might be in the dark. Simple explanations of the technology are still pretty scarce online. However, you have almost certainly interacted with an application built using Rails, and it may be that the technology could benefit you or your business.
Ruby itself is a programming language, first introduced in 1995 by Yukihiro Matsumoto, along the lines of Perl or PHP. Ruby's popularity among developers, say its advocates, has a lot to do with its focus on making programming fast and easy for developers.
Ruby on Rails, also known simply as "Rails" is a Web application framework written in the Ruby language.
A Web application framework is a collection of application building blocks that form a sort of supporting structure for a Web application. Most applications employ somewhat generic pieces of code that can be used repeatedly throughout the main application to perform functions like querying an SQL database and returning data for use by the rest of the application.
According to Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson, the framework was built from the generic parts created as he used Ruby to create Basecamp, the hosted Web-based project management tool from his company, 37signals.
Hansson made the pre-written libraries available as Rails, making the framework available for download at www.rubyonrails.org. Developers say the framework is broad enough to be suitable for building any kind of application, even while being incredibly simple and quick to use.
The tools include functions written for validating form data, application templates, sending and receiving email, formatting date and time, managing sessions and cookies, and building interactive functions into Web pages using AJAX.
AJAX, an acronym for Asynchronous Javascript and XML is a term that describes using a combination of Javascript, the Document Object Model and XML technologies to assemble page content in a browser from remote servers.
Ultimately, Ruby on Rails provides a simple and efficient environment for development using some of the latest technology and techniques for building Web applications. As a result, it is quickly becoming popular with developers, and there is every reason to believe that it will be an important part of application programming for years to come.
Already many hosts have introduced support for rails, and it is safe to assume that more hosts will continue to add their support as Rails becomes one of the key standards for Web development.
