Ruby on Rails is a full stack, cross-platform open source framework. David Heinemeier Hansson originally wrote it, but in the meantime there is already a small group of core developers working on it. It often is abbreviated to 'RoR' or 'Rails' and the latter will be used throughout this article. 'Full stack' means that all the parts needed to build a Web application are present. Instead of having to learn different frameworks and tools and trying to get them to work together, the different Rails layers fit together seamlessly, which makes it a joy to work with! It runs on all major operating systems like Linux, OS X and Windows; it supports the most common open source databases like MySQL and PostgreSQL but also SQL Server, Oracle and others. It uses any Web server that supports CGI, the most popular being Apache and Lighttpd.

One of the selling points of Rails is that it is built with the DRY principle in mind. DRY stands for Don't Repeat Yourself, meaning that every piece of your system is described once and only once, which should make development and maintenance a lot easier since there is no need to keep multiple parts of the code in sync. Hand in hand with DRY goes 'Convention over Configuration', another one of Rails' core philosophies. Rails uses a set of code and naming conventions that when adhered to eliminates the need for configuring every single aspect of your application. Only the extraordinary stuff needs to be configured, like legacy database schemas or other resources you don't control. Using these two philosophies, DRY and 'Convention Over Configuration', Rails lets you write less code AND more features in the same time as with a typical Java or .NET application, with easier maintenance afterwards.

Rails is an MVC framework, which means your application is divided into three layers: the Model, the View and the Controller. Rails consists of several separate libraries. The two most important, which implement the MVC paradigm, are ActionPack, which takes care of the View and the Controller layers and ActiveRecord for the Model layer.