What is Ruby on Rails?

Ruby on Rails is an MVC Framework that can be used to build highly functional web applications. It includes everything you generally need to be productive quickly for building your app.

“Hold on, what does MVC mean?” - Glad you asked! MVC stands for Model View Controller. We can get into this a bit better later on, but you can think of it as the structure for organizing your code.

We’ll have things called models, that hold a lot of information about things. You may hear people talk about how models hold “business logic”. 

Then we have the views, which are exactly what they sound, the things people will see. If you need an API, these may be JSON views, otherwise, they will likely be HTML, with some Ruby sprinkled in.

Behind all of it will be controllers that coordinate for us. When you click on links the controllers then talk to a database and return the views with the information you wanted to see.

Don’t worry if that seems hard to make sense of, things will become clearer as we get further into it.

In the meantime, did you know some of the worlds most popular websites have used Ruby on Rails? Fun fact for you, Shopify, Hulu, Yellow Pages, GitHub, and Airbnb all use Ruby on Rails. 

“You mean when I booked my last vacation, it was a Rails app?” Yep! If you used Airbnb you used a Rails app. Isn’t that cool?