What is Ruby on Rails?

Posted on: 09 May, 2009

Ruby on Rails is an open source web development framework. That may sound a little scary but if you hold on to your hat I’ll do the best to explain what that means.

Open source simply means that anyone can contribute to the project or use the code. For free. There is lots of absolutely fantastic software being developed in this way, and Ruby on Rails (AKA Rails, or RoR) falls into that category. A web development framework is really just what it sounds like, a scaffolding for constructing web applications. Using Rails means that web applications can be written faster, and will work better. The benefit to the customer is that Rails applications will be cheaper to make and more reliable than someone not using a web development framework. There are other web development frameworks out there, but Rails is my favourite and I am in some very good company.

For more detailed information check this page on Wikipedia.