Ruby on Rails, often shortened to Rails, is an open source full-stack web application framework for the Ruby programming language. Ruby on Rails runs on the general-purpose programming language Ruby, which predates it by more than a decade. Rails is a full-stack framework, meaning that it gives the web developer the ability to create pages and applications that gather information from the web server, talk to or query the database, and render templates out of the box. As a result, Rails features a routing system that is independent of the web server.