Ruby on Rails on i site back up

I have been juggling a couple of initiatives of running Ruby on IBM i. JRuby has released their latest version and when combined with the latest Rails it is pretty stable and productive. Although the site is running the JRuby interpreter because of the ease in which it makes the database connection work, I am working with a developer in Italy and an IBM contact to get a "native" (read: PASE) version of Ruby running on i as well.

Why would you want to consider Ruby, instead of something like PHP or CGIDEV or even something like RPGUI initiative that Aaron is supporting? Well, for someone who is a dyed in the wool RPG'er, there probably is more learning curve in mastering Ruby than the typical RPG developer would want to bite off and chew, so it may not be a good fit. However, if you are looking at web development, want to learn a new language, want to get up and running quickly with web application in a productive environment that is open source, then this might be something you could consider. Also, if you are a web development shop looking at hiring new web developers, you can add this to your bag of tricks.

Personally, the RPG approach that Aaron is pursuing seems to have the most logical promise for RPG'ers but some folks (like me) that have a natural curiosity about stuff like this might find it interesting

I don't plan to debate the relative merits of PHP vs Rails, nor do I think Rails is the "answer" for all web development, but there is always value in adding yet another proven technology to the IBM i arsenal, so I post it here for the curious, if nothing else.

Right now the warm up is lengthly due to the web server I am using, and it will occasionally throw a 'nil' error because of the slowness of the server but I'll move it under Apache in the next few days where it should perform better.

http:\\www.railsoni.com If you have any interest.

Pete