Michael Campbell wrote:
> 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