[programminggeek]

Sorry, perhaps I wasn't clear enough. On an ActiveRecord model you will have attributes that are simple values in a table and you can have methods on an object that do stuff. They might both be methods, but the difference between getting a simple attribute and doing a calculation can be incredibly huge once you have models related to other models and calculations that span between them.

In my experience ActiveRecord doesn't handle that particularly well and programmers don't readily know/see the difference because they all look the same, especially in a view.

[jshen]

This has nothing to do with ruby. In any language you can have a method that returns an attribute or a method that calculates something.