Routing has a nice little DSL.

It includes an idea of resources, which map REST to CRUD.

They have three methods for returning responses:

render

return a normal response

redirect_to

return an HTTP status code

head

return some HTTP headers

If you inherit from ActionController, it will find and render the appropriate view by default.

You can override methods corresponding to the CRUD operations if you want different behaviour.

You usually write views as .html.erb files, which are a templating language. This has keywords for loops, if statements, forms and so on.

Alternatively, there's a programmatic XML creating thing called Builder, and a third party Gem called JBuilder for making JSON.

You can also break your templates up so that you can share parts between them.

Uses an ORM to generate a database schema. It appears to be sensible, covering most of SQL, allowing joins and prefetching. You can handwrite SQL when you need to.

Uses the Active Record pattern, which magically injects database code into the domain model.

There are some event hooks relating to database operations, which you can add your own code to.

Models can also include validation code.

Rails defaults to using CoffeeScript and SCSS.

There is a rails command:

rails new name

set up a new project

rails server

run development web server

rails console

read-eval-print-loop

rails dbconsole

interactive database session

rails generate model Name field:type field:type

create a model class