Welcome to Rubyology!

Rubyology is the study of Ruby on Rails! Our weekly podcast and weblog breaks down key Ruby and Rails programming techniques with the hopes of increasing your understanding of this marvelous Ruby language and Rails framework.

Why Ruby on Rails?

Ruby is a powerful object oriented language that is easy to pick up and very flexible. It was developed in 1995 by Yukihiro Matsumoto known in the community as “matz”. Ruby is totally free. Not only free of charge, but also free to use, copy, modify, and distribute.

The Rails framework was developed a couple of years ago by David Heinemeier Hansson of 37 Signals as basically a post implementation project extracting common database and framework logic from the BaseCamp application. It supports DB2, MySQL, Oracle, Postgres, SQL Server, and SQL Lite. Rails is also available free of charge and like Ruby it runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux platforms.

Ruby and Rails have both proven to stable, scalable, and secure. Ruby is fun, Rails saves time by reducing the overhead of managing generic settings and database and email routines. Changes to my application are responsive and immediate - they're either immediately bad or immediately good. I really appreciate the scaffolding feature for building out quick database screens and the new RESTful features that provide HTML and XML representation of your data with no additional coding.

Cool Web 2.0 features like AJAX lookups, edit-in-place forms, and drag and drop client side features are super simple. The framework is open enough to support vendor plugins which make features such as tagging, rating, and image manipulation or graphing as simple as borrowing other experts' solutions.