Ruby and Ruby on Rails

Ruby is completely an object-oriented programming language. So, everything is an object in Ruby. Basic data types, like strings and numbers and even booleans. 

If you are not familiar with OOP syntax, Ruby's syntax is very forgiving and easy for beginners. The documentation is great and easy flowing. It was specifically designed to make developers happy. A good and popular web framework, Rails, is built with Ruby.

Why use Rails?

1. It is an open source web application used by many companies such as Air BnB, Groupon, Hulu, Github, Shopify, etc.
2. It is very robust.
3. Has been around for a while.
4. It is easy for people to pick it up as it has great documentation.
5. Scales well.

Rails are famous for enforcing the model view controller(MVC) design pattern. It also has an ORM or Object Relational Map, where you don't have to be able to write queries to be able to query the database. So, basically, it provides methods for you to query information without actually having to write the SQL code yourself.

It is also great for prototyping. So, there is this concept with Scaffold where we could create a whole application in only four command lines.

When to use Rails?

It is a full stack framework where it is gonna allow you to interact with the view and the database, and everything that comes in between. So, it is gonna do a lot of configurations for you, and unlike some frameworks that only work on the client-side, Rails will be the whole thing. It can also provide APIs endpoint so that people could make API requests to a Rails application.

It is also great for testing. It provides you tools to be able to test your code all the way from beginning to the end of your application.

So, in the big picture of the Internet, Ruby is gonna be a server-side language and Rails will be the framework that is gonna use Ruby to surf data to the client. So, the client is gonna make an HTTP request for a specific file. So, Ruby will do some logic, along with the web server and the database to patch that data, and give it back to you as HTTP response.