Ruby on Rails is a Web application framework that aims to provide an easy path to application development. In fact, the framework's proponents claim that Ruby on Rails developers can be up to ten times more productive than they would be when using traditional J2EE frameworks. While this statement has been the source of considerable debate in the Rails and J2EE communities, little has actually been said about how Rails and J2EE architectures compare. This article will contrast the Rails framework against a typical J2EE implementation using common open source tools that are regularly found in enterprise applications.

Developers are flocking to Ruby on Rails at an incredible pace. There's a great reason for this migration: Rails provides a robust framework built on one of the most flexible languages ever conceived. One of the tricks in the Rails bag is the concept of "Migrations." Migrations provide an excellent example of why developers would want to use the framework, and here's why: Generally speaking, managing changes to a database schema has been one of the most odious tasks for a team of developers. Most have relied on storing DDL in revision control, ever vigilant to ensure that our database creation scripts are updated and consistent with each rollout. That solution can be very clumsy in an Extreme Programming project. And because Rails encourages iterative development, it would be very easy to imagine the constant schema changes turning into nightmares. Fortunately, Migrations allows a developer to manage rollout, and rollback, of database schema changes in a controlled and consistent manner, and one that happens to feel very natural to a Rails programmer.

Ruby on Rails has raised the bar in terms of rapid development of data-driven Web sites. The JRuby project is making Ruby faster and more scalable than ever. One of the great advantages to running Rails on the Java Virtual Machine is that you can leverage other Java libraries, like the Apache Derby embedded database. The combination of Derby, JRuby, and Rails allows for rapid prototyping of dynamic Web applications. Learn how to use these technologies together to help you prototype your next great idea.

Rhomobile has revolutionized the process of developing mobile applications. It has enabled developers to become much faster and more efficient, allowing quicker application development. It enables software programmers to build applications for mobile devices using HTML and Ruby instead of proprietary languages such as Objective-C. Currently, the Rhodes framework supports development for the iPhone, Windows Mobile, Google Android, Symbian, and BlackBerry operating systems.

Joern Barthel introduces the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP), and illustrates it's useage from a Ruby app with the open source RabbitMQ server on the backend (which is written in Erlang).

ActiveRecord is a fantastic persistence framework, but since the framework hides low-level details from you, it can be prone to performance problems. Discover the most common problems and how you can solve them.

In addition to building Web and console applications with Ruby, you can write complex GUI desktop applications that run unmodified on multiple platforms. Thanks to JRuby, a robust alternative to the traditional C implementation of Ruby, Ruby GUI toolkits can use UI tools available to the Java™ platform. This article introduces Monkeybars, a library that uses JRuby and Swing for building applications, and takes you through an example application. Ruby is currently best known as a programming language for building Web applications, primarily with the Ruby on Rails framework. However, the language is more than capable for developing graphical desktop applications as well. In this article, you'll learn more about using Ruby for the desktop, and you'll work through a detailed example that uses Monkeybars — an open source library based on Swing and JRuby — to create a GUI desktop application.

This article proposes a Rails refactoring catalog.

Ruby on Rails provides an excellent platform for building Web applications. Discover how to use the built-in Asynchronous JavaScript™ + XML (Ajax) features of the platform to give your application the Web 2.0 rich user interface experience.
If you haven't heard about Rails, then welcome back from your trip to planet Zorton, which is the only place you could go and not hear about Ruby on Rails over this past year. Rails is at its most appealing when it allows you to get your application and its features up and running quickly. Rails' built-in integration with the Prototype.js library for Ajax makes it easy to build so-called rich Internet applications quickly.
This article takes you through the steps of building a Rails application. It then dives right into using the Ajax features to build the JavaScript code that reads and writes data from the server.

The Ruby programming language was released to the public in 1995 and gained widespread adoption in 2006. A multipurpose language that focuses on simplicity and productivity, it combines the best features of many compiled and interpreted languages, such as easy development of large programs, rapid prototyping, almost-real-time development, and compact code. Ruby is a reflective, dynamic, and interpreted object-oriented scripting language, and JRuby is a Java programming language implementation of the Ruby language syntax, core libraries, and standard libraries. With JRuby, you get all of the advantages of Ruby plus interoperability with Java platform applications (Java applications) and access to the full range of Java platform functionality. JRuby and the Java platform are a compelling combination that you can apply to any programming situation. For example, from a JRuby script, you can call the Java platform Math library to access its powerful computational capabilities or call the Java platform Swing library to display a dialog box that requires end-user input before allowing the script to proceed. Also, you can use the JSR 223 Scripting APIs or the Bean Scripting Framework (BSF) APIs to call a JRuby script from within a Java application to, for example, invoke back-end processing scripts from a servlet to update or generate web content. This introductory article gets you started using JRuby and the Java platform. It shows you how to set up JRuby, explains the basics of using JRuby scripts with Java applications and the NetBeans integrated development environment (NetBeans IDE), and provides links to help you learn more. Also, the Getting Started section briefly introduces RubyGems and Ruby on Rails.