Web Application ruby technology

[Michael Campbell]

Apologies for not paying attention much to the countless previous
threads related to web application ruby technologies, but I haven't
needed any of them... until now.

I'm going to be writing a web application, and I'm considering using
Ruby. I was wondering if someone could give a quick, terse list of
the popular packages out there for this sort of work.

Were I doing this in Java (my profession, BTW), I'd use an app
server, jdbc to a database, with (likely) struts/jsp on the front
end. What I'm looking for is [however rough] ruby equivalents to
that. By "equivalent", I mean from a problem solving context, not
necessarily a technological equivalent.

I can do the footwork of researching the things; I'm not looking for
that necessarily, but rather just a starting point of things to check
out.

As part of this application will be some sort of shopping cart
functionality, any recommendations there as well as CGI speedup
things (mod_ruby, et. al.) would be appreciated as well.

Again, sorry for the vagueness of this... criticism on how to better
structure my question is ALSO welcome.

Thanks,


Michael

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[Sean O'Dell]

Apologies for not paying attention much to the countless previous
threads related to web application ruby technologies, but I haven't
needed any of them... until now.

I'm going to be writing a web application, and I'm considering using
Ruby. I was wondering if someone could give a quick, terse list of
the popular packages out there for this sort of work.

Were I doing this in Java (my profession, BTW), I'd use an app
server, jdbc to a database, with (likely) struts/jsp on the front
end. What I'm looking for is [however rough] ruby equivalents to
that. By "equivalent", I mean from a problem solving context, not
necessarily a technological equivalent.

I can do the footwork of researching the things; I'm not looking for
that necessarily, but rather just a starting point of things to check
out.

As part of this application will be some sort of shopping cart
functionality, any recommendations there as well as CGI speedup
things (mod_ruby, et. al.) would be appreciated as well.

Again, sorry for the vagueness of this... criticism on how to better
structure my question is ALSO welcome.

Thanks,

The server part is up in the air; depends what you want to do. You
could use mod_ruby and Apache as your server, you could try webrick or
you could write a Java extension to embed the Ruby engine and continue
to use Java as your framework and call into Ruby to do the work (for
fast prototyping). Or you can, as I am planning on doing in the
not-too-distant-future here, putting together your own framework server
from libwww and embedding the engine.

Either way:

Look around RAA (http://raa.ruby-lang.org/) for SQL engines. I
personally tend to use ruby-dbi
(http://raa.ruby-lang.org/list.rhtml?name=ruby-dbi) to talk directly to
MySQL databases.

For producing HTML output, I prefer templates over embedding my Ruby
code ASP-style ala eRuby. Instead of eRuby, I use PageTemplate and push
my variables to a template, then CGI.print the final HTML back to
Apache. Works pretty well.

Sean O'Dell