Ruby on Rails is an extremely productive web application framework written in Ruby by David Heinemeier Hansson.
This is a open source Ruby framework for developing database-backed web applications.
This tutorial will give you a complete understanding on Ruby on Rails.
Before we ride on Rails, let's know a little bit about Ruby which is the base of Rails.
Ruby is the successful combination of:
Smalltalk's conceptual elegance,
Python's ease of use and learning, and
Perl's pragmatism
Ruby is A High Level Programming Language
Interpreted like Perl, Python, Tcl/TK.
Object-Oriented Like Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, Java.
Originated in Japan and Rapidly Gaining Mindshare in US and Europe.
Why Ruby ?
Ruby is becoming popular exponentially in Japan and now in US and Europe as well. Following are greatest factors:
Easy to learn
Open source (very liberal license)
Rich libraries
Very easy to extend
Truly Object-Oriented
Less Coding with fewer bugs
Helpful community
Why Not Ruby ?
Performance - Although it rivals Perl and Python.
Threading model does not use native threads.