Introducing Activerecord

Abstract

In the last chapter, we took a high-level tour of not only creating our first Rails application but also of using the controller and view components to render some static text in response to a request. The application that we put together was intentionally incredibly simple. I wanted you to start out your Rails learning experience by first learning what a Rails application looks like and to get a hands-on feel for the process we use to send a request to a Rails application and to receive a response back from it. That request-response cycle is key to understanding the big picture of how Rails works. Everything else we learn about in Rails is simply to enhance that process through actions such as pulling data from a database, formatting data for display, and inserting the dynamic data into the response that’s returned. That’s why our previous application focused on letting you see exactly how we were able to send requests to a Rails application and how Rails is able to send back different responses.