"The Ruby language is often cited for its flexibility. You can, as Dick Sites said, "write programs to write programs." Ruby on Rails extends the core Ruby language, but Ruby itself makes that extensibility possible. Ruby on Rails uses the language's flexibility to make it easy to write highly structured programs without much boilerplate or extra code: You get a large amount of standard behavior with no extra work. Although this free behavior isn't always perfect, you get a lot of good architecture in your application without much work.
"For example, Ruby on Rails is based on a Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern, which means that most Rails applications are cleanly split into three parts. The model contains the behavior necessary to manage an application's data. Typically, in a Ruby on Rails application, there is a 1:1 relationship between models and database tables; ActiveRecord, the object-relation mapping (ORM) that Ruby on Rails uses by default, manages the model's interaction with the database, which means that the average Ruby on Rails program has very little, if any, SQL coding. The second part, the view, consists of the code that creates the output sent to the user; it typically consists of HTML, JavaScript, etc. The final part, the controller, turns input from the user into calls to the correct models, then renders a response using the appropriate views.
"Proponents of Rails often cite this MVC paradigm — along with other benefits of both Ruby and Rails — as increasing its ease of use, claiming that fewer programmers can produce more functionality in less time. This, of course, means more business value for each software development dollar, so Ruby on Rails development has become significantly more popular."
