This one isn’t so much a recipe-styled “Howto” as it is a discussion piece regarding different approaches to designing and developing your application.

It was initially prompted by intinig’s question about an approach to Rails development

One of the features of Rails that confuses people learning the framework is the automatic pluralization of Model and table names.

Because Rails emphasizes convention over configuration, it’s important that you use the right terms. The Rails generators do not enforce these configurations, so you must learn and follow them. For example, the convention is to use singular model names, but the generator will let you use a plural. Don’t do it! Use the singular for you ...