Tutorial Ruby is an object oriented scripting language. Rails is a Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework based on Ruby and used for developing web applications. An advantage of Ruby on Rails over J2EE is that it requires less code and doesn’t require any configuration files, except for a database configuration file. A Ruby on Rails web application may be developed simply with a web server and a database; and the Rails framework includes a built-in web server, WEBrick (another web server such as Apache may also be used). The Rails framework is configured for the MySQL database by default but Rails also supports PostgreSQL, SQL Server, Oracle and DB2 databases.

Overview of Ruby

Ruby is an interpreted scripting language for object-oriented programming: “interpreted” implies that a Ruby application is run without first compiling the application. Variables in Ruby do not have a type (a Ruby variable may contain data of any type). Variables in Ruby may be used without any variable declarations. Ruby, being an object oriented language, has features such as classes, inheritance and methods.

Overview of Rails

Rails is a web application and database persistence framework for developing web applications according to the MVC pattern. Models are used to model objects in a Rails application and are typically based on ActiveRecord. An ActiveRecord model class extends the ActiveRecord::Base class. Models provide object-relational mapping (ORM) between business objects and a database. Views are the user interfaces and are represented by RHTML or RXML templates, RHTML being Ruby embedded HTML, and RXML Ruby-generated XML. The controller is a class that extends the ActionController::Base class and consists of actions (methods). For each method in a controller class, you either define a view template with a matching name, redirect to a view template or a controller action or render text in the template that invoked the controller action with render :text method. A view template contains links to actions (methods) defined in the controller. A controller integrates the model with the view. The model models data objects, the controller defines business logic to process the data, and the view presents the data.

The model and controller scripts may be generated with Ruby on Rails commands, some of which are discussed in the table below:

Installing Ruby on Rails

In this section we shall install the Ruby on Rails framework, and RubyGems. RubyGems is the standard Ruby package manager. Download the Ruby Windows Installer application and double-click on the ruby184-19.exe application. Ruby Setup Wizard gets started in which click on Next and accept the license agreement. Select the default components to install, which include the RubyGems package manager. Specify a directory to install Ruby, c:/ruby being the default, and click on Install. Ruby and RubyGems gets installed. Next, install Rails. From the c:/ruby directory, the directory in which Ruby is installed, run the following command to install Rails and dependencies including activerecord and actionpack - Activerecord implements the model components of a Rails MVC application and actionpack implements the view and controller components:

c:/ruby>gem install rails --include-dependencies

Now install Oracle database 10g including sample schemas and create a database instance, ORCL for example. Next, install Ruby driver for Oracle database, which is required to connect to Oracle database from a Ruby on Rails application. Download this file (ruby-oci8-0.1.15-mswin32.rb) to c:/ruby directory and from the c:/ruby directory run the Ruby application for Oracle database drive:

 c:/ruby>ruby ruby-oci8-0.1.15-mswin32.rb

This installs the Ruby driver for the Oracle database. Next, we shall create a Rails application, rubyrails, using the following command:

 c:/ruby>rails rubyrails

This generates a Rails application directory structure. The root directory of the Rails application is rubyrails. The app sub-directory consists of sub-directories models, views and controllers for model scripts, view templates and controller scripts. The config directory consists of a database.yml configuration file, used to define a database configuration (as mentioned, by default this is configured for MySQL database). The db directory consists of a sub-directory migrate that consists of migration scripts.