From: "John W. Long" Date: 2004-05-30T00:03:28+09:00 Subject: Re: eruby vs php/jsp... Shannon Fang wrote: > Could any one give me a suggestion on this? What I am particularly > intersted is the readyness of eRuby in production environment > (especially session support etc. heard that php has session problem in > achievo). How about ActiveScriptRuby? If you can wait a month or two, Ruby on Rails will probably be out. Rails was used to build Basecamp, a popular project management system by 37signals. The lead developer David Heinemeier Hansson describes the process of building Basecamp in a two hour presentation here: http://www.loudthinking.com/arc/000232.html Slides from the presentation are available here: http://www.loudthinking.com/arc/000228.html Your needs may vary. Rails is more of a Web Application Framework than a templating system, so it may not be the best thing for you. We use eRuby on mod_ruby at work and have found that it works rather well. It's very different from PHP, and the project isn't as mature as PHP, so the learning curve is initialy steeper. The payoff of being able to use ruby is huge. There are several ways of using eRuby. You can use it as a cgi app much like PHP can be used (you tell apache to pipe all files with a rhtml extention through eruby). Or you can use it in conjuction with mod_ruby. The primary disadvantage of using it with mod_ruby is that libraries that are "required" are loaded into a shared memory space. The only way to unload them (and you will need to unload them when ever you modify a library file) is to restart Apache. The shared memory space also makes it impossible to use securely in a "shared" server environment (an environment where multiple people have access to different websites running on the same Apache instance). These two points can make the eRuby + mod_ruby somewhat hairy to use in a production environment. The primary advantage to the eRuby + mod_ruby route is that libraries are only loaded once for a particular apache process, which may handle multiple requests (think speed). If the shared environment of mod_ruby bothers you, you should probably consider FastCGI. eRuby is just a console application that is useful for converting a ASP like rhtml file into pure ruby code. eRuby will optionally pipe the generated code through the ruby interpreter and send back the results on stdout. There are many different solutions for using eRuby, and probably one that would meet your needs. Can you describe a little bit more about what you are trying to do, and then others on the list can provide solutions? -- John Long http://wiseheartdesign.com