The lifecycle of a Rails run

The process of listening to and responding to a request coming in to a Rails application can be broken into several stages:

1. the Web server talking to the dispatcher (which is a Ruby program);
2. the dispatcher awakening the appropriate controller and asking that controller to perform aparticular action;
3. the performance of that action;
4. the filling out of the view, based on the data manipulations carried out in the controller action.