Ruby is "an interpreted scripting language for quick and easy object-oriented programming". Rails is a framework built for the Ruby language. Rails swept to world-wide attention in the Spring of 2005. Since then, it has become a serious and popular alternative to traditional web development environments such as Java and .NET. Why? Because Rails has the best of both worlds.

You want to write professional-grade applications: Rails is a full-stack, open-source web framework, with integrated support for unit, functional, and integration testing. It enforces good design principles, consistency of code across your team (and across your organization), and proper release management.

But Rails is more than a set of best practices. Rails also makes it both fun and easy to turn out very cool web applications. Need Ajax support, so your web applications are highly interactive? Rails has it built in. Want an application that sends and receives e-mail? produces and consumes web services? supports meaningful URLs? All built-in.

Thanks to DeLynn Berry there is now a CHM version of the Ruby on Rails documentation. You can download the latest version from the project website or get an archive from the Hiveminds download area.

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