Welcome to Rails: NodeJS

What's Rails

Rails is a web-application framework that includes everything needed to create database-backed web applications according to the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern.

Understanding the MVC pattern is key to understanding Rails. MVC divides your application into three layers: Model, View, and Controller, each with a specific responsibility.

Model layer

The model layer is currently unimplemented.

Controller layer

The Controller layer is responsible for handling incoming HTTP requests and providing a suitable response. Usually this means returning HTML, but Rails:NodeJS controllers can also generate XML, JSON, PDFs, mobile-specific views, and more. Controllers load and manipulate models, and render view templates in order to generate the appropriate HTTP response.

In Rails, incoming requests are routed to an appropriate controller dynamically based on the URL.

View layer

The View layer is composed of "templates" that are responsible for providing appropriate representations of your application's resources. Templates are HTML with embedded Javascript code (EJS files). Views are typically rendered to generate a controller response, or to generate the body of an email.

In Rails:NodeJS, View generation is handled by EJS.

Frameworks and libraries

No outside frameworks or libraries are used at this time.

Getting Started

1. Install Rails:NodeJS at the command prompt if you haven't yet:

    $ npm install -g rails-nodejs

2. At the command prompt, create a new Rails application:

    $ nrx new myapp

   where "myapp" is the application name.

3. Change directory to myapp and start the web server:

    $ cd myapp
    $ nrx server

   Run with --help or -h for options.

4. Go to http://localhost:3000 and you'll see the welcome aboard page

License

NodeJS on Rails is released under the MIT License.