Ruby on Rails

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http://www.rubyonrails.org/

I've been playing with this new web development framework for a few weeks. It's stunning in the way I can quickly get a web application working in no time at all. It's like working with a big Lego set and just as fun.

Demo video:

http://www.rubyonrails.org/media/video/ ... _sound.mov

Once i tried to get into ruby but I never got off the ground. I saw something about this mentioned on slashdot recently.

If you want Rails functionality, but are used to PHP, try cake (http://sputnik.pl/cake).

I tried ruby once too, and didn't get very far. i love what ruby on rails can do, and would love to learn it, but it's hard to figure out where to start. i've been to the rubyonrails site, but got confused, even though it seemed to very well organized and to have much info for beginners. I'm kind of confused about the 'rails' part. Can anyone explain what it is in a relatively simple way? i do a lot of php tweaking, but not much programming from scratch.

Well the basic facts are that Ruby on Rails is a framework that helps you quickly create web applications. All the code written for Rails is written using Ruby. The reason why developing an app is so easy and fast is that Rails generates most of the repetitive code for you. What I mean by repetitive is the stuff you have to code in order to get the program established (database connections, queries, etc). From there, you fill in the blanks with dynamic templates and programming logic. Since Ruby is easy to learn, you already have a quick start at creating a database backed website.

The video is a real time demonstration. It shows how you build a blog engine.
http://www.rubyonrails.org/media/video/ ... _sound.mov

There's a book coming out soon:
http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/titl ... index.html

You can purchase the e-book and the actual book for $45.

Thanks BitterGeek! That's even cooler than I thought

One more question... What kind of servers will ruby on rails run on?

Windows, Mac, Linux, UNIX. Anything really. Usually you build the app using the build-in WEBrick server then deploy it on an Apache server supporting FastCGI.

Yeah, I'd love to do some stuff in Ruby on Rails, I've read good things about it. But the problem is that the only places I can deploy stuff I work on are standard webhosts, where you just get the standard PHP 4.x/MySQL , and at work, where we're very standardized on Oracle stuff and trying to keep extraneous dependencies out of our apps, since not only do we have our own servers to worry about, but the actual apps get shipped over to this fancy Army web farm in Vicksburg, MI. Plus, that's just for work.

Maybe one of these days I'll shell out for a dedicated server and get to fool around with this stuff (I know I could just do it locally, but what's the fun in that?).

Dreamhost now fully supports Rails. Same deal for Planet Argon.

Sweet! I'll need to check that out. But one of the things I need in a host is the ability to have multiple domains on independent sub-accounts, which limits it to the standard Plesk/cPanel WHM stuff. Last time I checked out dreamhost, their options weren't that good.

Turns out DreamHost is exactly what I'm looking for. I signed up, transferred most of my sites over. They're awesome! Thanks for the recommendation

I got the Rails book from the Pragmatic Programmers. I'm going to try it out and see how I do.