Important Framework Components of Ruby on Rails

Important Framework Components of Ruby on Rails

In yesterday’s post, I related how Ruby on Rails developers, the intense HyTech Professionals (www.hytechpro.com) teams for instance, push the envelope for rich Web 2.0 applications by keeping their eye on five key RoR principles: trimmer code, segregation by sub-frameworks, not having to repeat one’s self, minimal configuration requirements, and instant feedback just by loading in a browser.

Next, we review the framework components that drive the Ruby on Rails objectives of simplicity, productivity, ready re-use, scalability, testability, and ease of maintenance:

In setting up the link between domain objects and the database, the Active Record sub-framework converts create, read, update and delete (CRUD) commands, the four basic functions of persistent storage, into SQL functions and transmits these to the database. The key point is that Ruby on Rails activates a table when called in the database and automatically creates the required class.

Among others, Action Controller relies on actions developer-defined actions to receive requests, determines whether these are actions or objects requiring processing, and returns the proper view to the browser.

As the presenting sub-framework, Action View fills either RHTML or RXML templates with data in HTML format.

Finally, support for Web services – those based on SOAP and XML-RPC – is provided by what else but Action Web Services? These do the job of publishing functionality better than the Representational State Transfer approach available with Active Controller.

Given these two admittedly-brief overviews of Ruby on Rails architecture and functionality, you probably understand better now why this platform has impressed folks on the cutting edge as a stable and sophisticated framework for agile Web engineering. In my next post, we’ll go over some real-world applications.