Summary

In this chapter, you learned about the primary features and components of web applications. You learned about the abstraction layers present in Rails applications and how they correspond to the web nature of Rails and its MVC philosophy. You learned about the unit of work and execution context concepts and their relationship with the inbound abstraction layers.

You also learned about the potential trade-offs between abstractions and application performance and, in particular, the database. This chapter demonstrated the fundamental ideas behind the layered software architecture, which we will refer to a lot throughout the book.

In the next chapter, you’ll dig deeper into the M part of the MVC architecture and learn about the design ideas that make Active Record the most significant part of the Ruby on Rails framework.