What is Rails For

Rails is designed from the ground up to create dynamic Web sites that use a relational database backend. It adds key words to the Ruby programming language that make Web applications easier to configure. In addition, it¡¯s designed to automatically generate a complete, if somewhat crude, Web application from an existing database schema. The latter is both Ruby¡¯s greatest strength and its Achilles¡¯ heel. Rails makes assumptions about database schema naming conventions that, if followed, make generating a basic Web site a matter of executing single command. But to do this may require additional configurations or in some cases may not be possible at all. You¡¯re also likely to find that just about every database convention that Rails expects can be overridden, but the more overriding that is needed, the less productive the platform becomes. This is why Rails is great when developing ¡°green-field¡± applications with new databases. Unfortunately, it¡¯s not a great solution when dealing with legacy systems.

The best way to appreciate Rails in green-field application development is via an example. If you already have an Oracle database installed on which you can create new databases and tables, it should take less than 15 minutes to create a complete Web application. In this case, we¡¯ll use Ruby of Rails to build a product catalog.