It is important to note that Ruby and Ruby on Rails are not the same things. Ruby can be viewed as the “parent” programming language. It is technically a scripting language that focuses on an object-oriented programming style. The language was developed in the 1990s by a developer known as Yukihiro Matsumoto. It is also important to note that Ruby itself was developed in the popular C programming language. It is possible to use Ruby apps on Windows, Linux, and macOS.
Ruby on Rails is not an entirely new programming language by itself. Instead, it was developed to serve as a framework for web applications. The framework is based and built on top of Ruby, and it largely depends on the presence of Ruby library files to function correctly.
The architecture used in Ruby on Rails applications is quite similar to those found in web development. David Heinemeier Hansson developed Ruby on Rails, which he released to the public as an open-source framework in 2005. A popular reason why developers prefer Ruby on Rails is due to the DRY approach. This means code can be efficiently reused in multiple parts of a web application.