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Project Details (title, language, url, purpose)
Ruby on Rails is a framework for web applications based on the Model-View-Controller pattern.
Language: Ruby
http://rubyonrails.org/
http://github.com/rails/rails

Summary: what was read/what it does

Description: more detailed over view

Pseudo code: what does this do, in pseudo code

Comments: Interesting techniques, tricks. Coding style, Things that could have been done better, balance between efficiency and clarity, quality of code-re-use. 

Architecture: Data models, Class hierarchy. Is the architecture clean, intuitive, easy to understand? If not, how would you change it?

Architecture Overview
https://cacoo.com/diagrams/cbs0dxfGzdlfRAOd

How hackable is this code (well documented, easy to find your way around, could create a patch/add a feature without too much pain): Score 1-5

Ruby on Rails provides tools to generate and grow applications piecemeal. This indirection makes it harder to find the relationship between the Rails source code and the running code in the application.

The framework is modular, and components may be reused independently from the whole Rails. Each component can be found is a different folder named after the component, e.g. "actionmailer" for the Action Mailer component.

The file/directory structure in each component directory is very similar, and each one features a separate README, CHANGELOG and Rakefile to generate the documentation and a gem.

The source code is located in the "lib" directory, which is a little confusing (there is no "src" directory).

Also, there is a "test" folder in each component, but I found test-related code within the "lib" folder as well, e.g. in "actionpack/lib/action_dispatch/testing".

Possible bugs identified, if any
The README file in the rails/actionpack folder contradicts the description of the Action Controller and Action Dispatch components in [GETTING-STARTED].

In [GETTING-STARTED], "The Action Controller framework processes incoming requests to a  Rails application, extracts parameters, and dispatches them to the  intended action. Services provided by Action Controller include session  management, template rendering, and redirect management."

This would rather correspond to the description of the Action Dispatch module in the README: "Action Dispatch, which parses information about the web request, handles routing as defined by the user, and does advanced processing related to HTTP such as MIME-type negotiation, decoding parameters in POST/PUT bodies, handling HTTP caching logic, cookies and sessions."

The order of module descriptions makes more sense in the README as well, "From request to response" (a description for the Action Pack on the first line of the file):

On the opposite, the order of the module descriptions in [GETTING-STARTED] looks random:

Ruby on Rails Setup on Ubuntu (Server) 10.04
# sudo apt-get install rails

References:
[GETTING-STARTED] Getting Started with Rails
http://guides.rubyonrails.org/getting_started.html