Calvin's and Candice's Rails App Directory Cheat-Sheet

Rails is a web development framework that is written in the Ruby language. The benefits of using this framework is that it greatly speeds up web development from prototyping to deployment. The Rails sets up conventions that enable developers to implement a RESTful software architectural design. Rails also creates a Agile approach to software development.

One of the major conventions of Rails is creation of default directories for web applications. In this cheat-sheet we will be focusing on the App directory. The App directory holds the Model-View-Controller subdirectories.

Here are brief descriptions of the App directory and its subdiresctories (taken directly from this tutorial):

• app: This organizes your application components. It's got subdirectories that hold the view (views and helpers), controller (controllers), and the backend business logic (models).
• app/controllers: The controllers subdirectory is where Rails looks to find controller classes. A controller handles a web request from the user.
• app/helpers: The helpers subdirectory holds any helper classes used to assist the model, view, and controller classes. This helps to keep the model, view, and controller code small, focused, and uncluttered.
• app/models: The models subdirectory holds the classes that model and wrap the data stored in our application's database. In most frameworks, this part of the application can grow pretty messy, tedious, verbose, and error-prone. Rails makes it dead simple!
• app/view: The views subdirectory holds the display templates to fill in with data from our application, convert to HTML, and return to the user's browser.
• app/view/layouts: Holds the template files for layouts to be used with views. This models the common header/footer method of wrapping views. In your views, define a layout using the layout :default and create a file named default.rhtml. Inside default.rhtml, call <% yield %> to render the view using this layout.