In this chapter, we provide a high-level overview of Ruby on Rails. === What Is a Web Framework? === Ruby on Rails is a prominent member of a new generation of web frameworks. So what exactly does that term mean? To answer that question, let's consider the design of a web application written in PHP, a popular way to write web applications at this time (circa 2008). PHP is a scripting language, mostly meant for producing dynamic web pages. When you write a PHP application, you do everything yourself -- the equivalent of baking a cake from scratch. For example, here's a simple PHP script, that displays the ten most recently published books from a database: [source, php] -----------------------------------------