Rails Gets Spooky Part 1
One of the biggest challenges of this unit, (really though) was fielding the question from curious friends and family members, “What is Rails, anyway?”. To which I’d say, “Rails is a framework…” Only to be met with blank stares. Although this subject is fairly rote to cover again, I think it’s important to review from this side of the project for my own comprehension and who knows maybe someone else could learn a thing or two?
So, what is Rails anyway?
Technically speaking — “Rails is a server-side web application framework written in Ruby. Rails is a model-view-controller framework, providing default structures for a database, a web service, and web pages. It encourages and facilitates the use of web standards such as JSON or XML for data transfer and HTML, CSS, and Javascript for user interfacing. In addition to MVC, Rails emphasizes the use of other well-known software engineering patterns and paradigms, including convention over configuration, don’t repeat yourself, and the active record pattern.” Thanks very much, Wikipedia!
Alright, I’ll take a stab at it… Rails can be thought of as a scaffolding for a web application that takes very little time, mere minutes to get ‘up-and-running’ with great capability of holding and manipulating data. It creates fast-loading pages using a simple method of communicating with the server, making the work of rendering pages a little easier. Every piece of a rails application is responsible for its own specific task, again keeping things very simple and organized. In addition to this Rails sticks to very well-known conventions for building web applications making it a fantastic tool for beginners or advanced programmers alike. Most importantly, I think, is that it’s designed to be filled with Ruby code which by all accounts is highly readable and customizable. Rails and Ruby were both created to make programmers happy and they seem to do just that.
I know you might be thinking, “Well if it’s so dang easy to use it must not be very impressive.” Well, my friend if you’ve ever used Hulu or Airbnb I think you’d be eager to learn that you’ve interacted with Rails before and I also would venture to say you were quite impressed with what it can do! Now, those are two examples of massive applications but it’s made clear by both that the possibilities are endless.
One of my very favorite websites and the same one I modeled my project after made its debut in 2008 but the stories were already floating around the web for a long time before then, giving the content its true charm because a lot of it seemed to just appear on message boards and in chat rooms from anonymous authors. Finally, a home was created for the orphan CreepyPastas in the form of a simple website designed for horror fiction, new and classic, to be submitted. It was a simple user interface, used a simple database structure, and left a lot to the imagination, which if you ask me is ideal for not just horror but my very first Rails application.
A lot like my experience with Sinatra, I didn’t fully understand a lot of what was even going on until I was responsible for putting the pieces together myself. I’d like to say that some of it was easy but really, it was quite challenging as a whole. Ultimately, armed with the knowledge that I should probably be able to answer the question above and a handful of my favorite scary stories I was able to make sense of the task.
