Basic Rails Concepts¶

In this section you'll be introduced to the basic concepts of software development with Ruby on Rails. After installing the whole framework, we'll show you the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern (a way of thinking about information flow of your web application). A web application is often composed by a set of objects working together, in the chapter Associations we'll show you how they work and how easy is to use them with Ruby. Next, we'll introduce you to the routing concept: how Rails manages requests from the client (usually a web browser) and the actions defined in your application. Building a perfectly-working web application is not always quick and easy, but we can surely take advantage of scaffolding features present in Rails: an easy way to create pages and forms to list, show, create, edit and delete objects. Finally, we'll talk about Forms. They give you a wide set of weaponsfor collecting information from the user, to manipulate objects present in your application.