Easily Code and Run Multi-Server Web Applications

Ruby is extremely general-purpose, so we can't really call it a "Web language;" but in fact it is very well-suited for Web applications. Web frameworks blossom in the Ruby community like violets in the spring: IOWA, Borges, Amrita, Nitro, Cerise, Rails, and others.

Kirk Haines of Enigo, Inc. reports having used Ruby successfully on twenty different sites. His framework of choice is IOWA, and he has written about 40,000 lines of Ruby for these applications, which get "a few hundred thousand" page views per day.

Gabriel Emerson reports that EvalSoft uses Ruby for both Web and non-Web applications.The company has about 20,000 lines of code, interfacing with PostgreSQL, written to handle student assessment evaluation for Texas school districts.

One of the newest and most trendy Web frameworks is called Ruby on Rails (or simply "Rails"). Some say it is overhyped; you can be your own judge after evaluating it. I'm not here to increase or decrease the hype, but only to say: Rails is here, it's being used, and it's working well for many people.

Ruby on Rails is a Web design framework built around the MVC design pattern (the Model-View-Controller abstraction). It leverages the dynamic and reflective properties of Ruby and sticks like glue to the "DRY Principle" ("Don't Repeat Yourself") made popular by the Pragmatic Programmers). It also embraces the "say no by default" rule — in effect, attempting to read the programmer's mind — and makes very effective use of code generation and the philosophy of "less software."

The original Rails application was BaseCamp), a Web-based project management tool conceived by 37 Signals). The project's lead designer, David Heinemeier Hansson, is the mind behind Rails. "The ease of use and the speed of development are catching the attention of developers," says Hansson.

Rails works with Apache, lighttpd, and Ruby's own lightweight server WEBrick. The Apache with mod_ruby solution will meet the needs of many applications, but others are using lighttpd and FastCGI because it scales so easily to multiple servers. One popular site built on Rails is 43things.com; watch also for the debut of the podcasting site, Odeo.