Inspired by Ruby on Rails Action Pack,[2] MonoRail differs from standard ASP.NET Web Forms development by enforcing separation of concerns using a model–view–controller (MVC) architecture.
[3] The framework is commonly used in conjunction with Castle ActiveRecord, an ORM layer built on NHibernate.
When it is time to send the web response to the client, the controller sets a view template to be rendered, putting data in a special dictionary object known as the "Property Bag", and delegates the template rendering to a view engine.
[4] The view engine renders the template into the response stream utilizing the data in the property bag given by the controller.
The mainstream view engine used in MonoRail is NVelocity, based on the Apache Velocity library.