Ruby on Rails is an application framework, written in Ruby and whose mainly purpose is to help ease the workflow of an MVC oriented website.

MVC = Model - View - Controller

This is the base of RoR (Ruby on Rails), and pretty much the main reason to use it (instead of other frameworks.)

A Model is anything that holds values, you could think of them as 'objects'. Although that is not quite accurate as models can also be a relation between two other Models. They are often represented by one column in the database. ( Although 'virtual' models exist as well. )

Here is an example:

A Forum User has a Name, Password, Settings, Posts, Signature, Avatar.

So it's model would be something like this in Rails:

attr_accessible is a security feature with which you can specify which attribute can be 'mass-assigned'. That means you update them all at once instead of having them individually. ( Mostly for convenience as it saves you from typing a lot. )

the lines 'has_one' and 'has_many' do exactly what it says, it tells rails that there is a setting that belongs to this User. There are also many posts that belong to this User.

A Controller is the application logic, it is what allows you to specify what an user is allowed to do. What he can see, etc...

For example let's consider a Forum Model, it has many Threads.

Here is an example of a Threads controller:

params is a hash where you have the parameters of the page.

With http://example.com/threads/1 the params hash would hold as an ":id" variable the number 1 which is the id of the thread model.

It all reads pretty much like English so it should be straightforward.

A View is what is displayed to the user. In it you can use Ruby ( by default it uses ERB as it's templating system ) to change the appearance of what you want.

Here is an example of my upcoming website:

This is the Roleplay Creation page. As you can see I use HTML & Ruby interleaved.

So this is why I love Ruby on Rails, if you want to do a resource oriented website it just fits the job perfectly. It's 'magic' is always the right way, especially if you are beginning.

I highly suggest this Framework to anyone starting into Web Development as it only beneficial. You learn a lot simply by shaping your application the 'rails way'.

Stay tuned for more!

If you wish to dive into Rails I highly suggest this tutorial:

http://ruby.railstutorial.org/ruby-on-rails-tutorial-book

It covers anything you need to know to start out.