Advantages of the Rails Framework

The Rails culture is steeped in open source tradition. The Rails source code is, of course, open. And it’s significant that Rails is licensed under the MIT license, arguably one of the most “free” software licenses in existence.

Rails also advocates the use of open source tools, and encourages the collaborative spirit of open source. The code that makes up Rails is 100% free and can be downloaded, modified, and redistributed by anyone at anytime. Moreover, anyone is free to submit patches for bugs or features, and hundreds of people from all over the world have contributed to the project over the past two years.

You’ll probably notice that a lot of Rails developers use Macs. The Mac is clearly the preferred platform of the core Rails team, and you’ll find in general that most Rails developers are using UNIX variants (of which Mac OS X is one). The UNIX operating system is hailed by hackers and used almost exclusively among the hacker elite. There are several reasons for this, not least of which is the fact that UNIX is a well-tested and proven operating system, forged in an open source ecosystem, with contributions from some of the smartest programmers on the planet. Having been born in the 1970s, at this late stage, the UNIX operating system has evolved into lean and powerful example of open source craftsmanship. The beauty, simplicity, and singularity of purpose of UNIX is not lost on the creators of Rails.

Although there is perhaps a marked bias towards UNIX variants when it comes to Rails developers, make no mistake, Rails is truly cross-platform. It doesn’t matter which operating system you choose, you’ll be able to use Rails on it. Rails doesn’t require any special editor or IDE to write code. Any text editor will do just fine, as long as it can save files in plain text. The Rails package even includes a built-in, stand-alone web server called WEBrick, so you don’t need to worry about installing and configuring a web server for your platform. When you want to run your Rails application in development mode, simply start up the built-in server and open your web browser. Why should it be any more difficult than that?

The next chapter will take you step by step through the relatively painless procedure of installing Rails and getting it running on your system. But before we go there, and before you start writing your first application, we would like to talk a bit about how the Rails framework is architected. This is important because, as you’ll see in a minute, it has a lot to do with how you organize your files and where you put them. Rails is actually a subset of a category of frameworks that are named for the way in which they divide the concerns of program design: the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern. Not surprisingly, the MVC pattern is the topic of our next section.

Please check back Monday for the conclusion to this article.