2 Architecture of Ruby on Rails Framework

Architecture of Rails framework is illustrated in the above given figure.

Rails architecture consists of 2 major elements:

• Active Record
• Action Pack

Active Record is an Object Relational Mapping (ORM) layer, which handles the Model element of the MVC application. This layer exposes the data table rows as model objects to the rest of the application.

Action Pack handles the View and Controller elements of the MVC application. Action Pack consists of two parts viz. Action View and Action Controller which handle View and Controller of the MVC application respectively.

Each of the architectural element in the picture above is elaborated below:

User Component – Rails web applications are accessed by browsers using various protocol interfaces such as HTTP, ATOM, RSS or consumed as Web Services using SOAP.

Web Server – The developed Rails application resides on a Web Server, which handles requests from the user component and forwards them to the Dispatcher.

Dispatcher – Dispatcher invokes appropriate controller based on the current user request.

Controller – Controller processes the user request, and invokes appropriate action. The action collaborates with appropriate model objects and prepares the response. If the request was from a browser, the response will be rendered through Action View component. Else, an appropriate response is relayed by either the Action Webservices or the Action Mailer component.