Recently, lots of words have been written about Ruby on Rails and lots of programmers had adopted or thought about adopting it. As a result, this young programming language has reached the top 10 of most popular programming languages. On the picture below you can see that ruby is the language with most gain of popularity. This statistics has been done by “TIOBE Software BV”. It represents ratings that are based on the world-wide availability of skilled engineers, courses and third party vendors. Moreover Yahoo!, MSN, and of course Google are used to calculate the ratings.

Well, I think that this index is a good enough confirmation that Ruby is no more a “back-stage player”. Moreover, in my view, if someone has a touch with the comfort and easiness of web developing with the help of Ruby on Rails - he will seriously think about adopting it as a primary web dev tool/lang. I have programming skills and experience with Perl, Java, PHP, however neither of them has given me the comfort of rails. My expectations are that in one or two years ruby will be a first-stop about developing moderate web applications. It won’t shift Java or PHP because they have long and hard roots in the market, however the young and new-comming developers will choose the clarity and easiness of Ruby on Rails.

Setting up a Ruby on Rails Application in a production environment could be a bit tricky. This is because the standard servers for running ruby could serve only one request at a time. As a result if there’s a slow database connection or any other process away from the application server no other requests could be served. On contrast Apache httpd spawns a new child if there’s a necessity to process a new request. In this article I’ll guide you how to solve this problem. Generally there will be an apache httpd server which will be used as a gateway to a cluster of mongrel_rails processes. So, all users will be accessing the apache as a frontend, however the whole processing burden will be let down to the mongrel servers. Here it is an example:

First to mention, I’m making this setup on Fedora Core 6. However it should be almost the same on older versions or other distributions. Note: Your apache should support mod_proxy_balancer (it is distributed with apache 2.2.x). So, the basic software requirements are:

• Ruby - You won’t go without a ruby interpreter (preferably version 1.8.5). On a Fedora 2 I did a source “compile and install” without any complications
• ruby-devel package - In case that you’ve installed ruby as a package you should install ruby-devel in order to compile a few mongrel related gems
• gem - The tool to install most of the extensions which are related to ruby. If you want to install from sources (it’s pretty easy: ruby setup.rb) you can download it from here: gem sources

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There were repeated claims that Linux violates Microsoft’s intellectual property and this has come to the attention of the Linux community. Not only that, but it’s been reported Microsoft has convinced businesses to pay for a Linux patent that you can’t provide.

As part of the Linux and the open source community and as people who work with linux and FOSS everyday we are glad to announce that we want Microsoft to Show Us The Code!

here is the official address of the project - http://showusthecode.com/

Many people read articles about Ruby but no one really cares to explain why really Ruby is so great. There are a couple of articles around the web providing a clue but no one really focus on production and actual Ruby application develop and deploy process. So this article will summarize all the information we tried to gather around the web and put it into one simple yet focused and pragmatic explanation of this question without much of any unnecessary details and code overview but pointing/naming the topic you might want to read in details.

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