Understanding The Ruby on Rails MVC Architecture

Quick reference

• 00:00 Okay.
• 00:05 Before we dive in here and start going through all these different directories
• 00:09 and files and things, I wanna take a quick step back and
• 00:12 talk about a broad concept that's kind of important moving forward.
• 00:15 And that concept is MVC.
• 00:18 MVC stands for model, view, and controller.
• 00:23 And it's a basic web development concept that is good for
• 00:27 you to understand moving forward.
• 00:29 It's gonna help you figure out what all these different directories are for and
• 00:33 they'll help you become a better developer.
• 00:35 What is MVC?
• 00:36 If we go to Google and head over Wikipedia,
• 00:39 there's a nice little article you can read if you're interested.
• 00:43 What we really want to do is just look at this picture right here.
• 00:47 The idea of an MVC is basically these three things.
• 00:50 We can ignore this user and just look at this.
• 00:53 M stands for model; that's database stuff.
• 00:56 Anytime your app uses a database, you're going to be dealing with model.
• 01:01 Views, those are webpages.
• 01:03 Anytime a user views a webpage that falls under view.
• 01:07 Controller is the brains behind the scene, it connects models and views.
• 01:12 It allows you to do programmatic things behind the scenes using computer code.
• 01:17 And it's a way to abstract out all your computer code from your actual view and
• 01:21 from your actual model.
• 01:23 And keeping these three things separate is very important.
• 01:27 It makes everybody's lives easier going forward.
• 01:30 Not just yours as the developer, but it makes better websites, too.
• 01:35 Now Ruby on Rails throughout this course, obviously.
• 01:38 But in the future, you may want to use Python and Jango, JavaScript and Node,
• 01:43 whatever, and a lot of these frameworks use this model view controller concept.
• 01:48 So, wrapping your brain around it right now is a good idea.
• 01:51 You don't have to know in great detail what this is all about,
• 01:55 I just want you to be aware that it exists.
• 01:59 These three things they're all separate, it's a way to keep things abstract out and
• 02:02 keep things straight.
• 02:03 Now it's important to us because if look through all these directories,
• 02:08 if we click on some of these and expand,
• 02:11 you can see it's pretty easy to get overwhelmed by all this stuff.
• 02:15 But if we look at all this through the eyes of an MVC architecture,
• 02:19 it becomes a lot easier to keep it all straight,
• 02:21 cuz all of these things are gonna fall under different sections of MVC.
• 02:26 Like you see right here, database config, that's gonna controller, your app.
• 02:30 You see this is views, that's gonna be obviously views.
• 02:33 So, we'll get into all this in the next video.
• 02:36 Right now, I just want you to be aware of this MVC thing.
• 02:40 If you wanna read more about it, you can here at Wikipedia.
• 02:42 It's not that important that you do that, but if you're interested,
• 02:46 it's something to keep in mind and you're definitely going to use it.
• 02:49 At least, conceptually, in your brain, moving forward, and it's
• 02:54 very important for modern web development, this idea of model-view-controller.
• 02:58 You'll run up against it many, many times throughout your career, so
• 03:01 just be aware of that.
• 03:02 Like I said, in the next video, we're gonna dive into all this and
• 03:06 we're gonna see how all these files and
• 03:08 directories relate to the model-view-controller system.
• 03:11 But for right now, just understand that Rails is a model-view-controller system.
• 03:16 And I think that's all for this video.

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