From: "James Britt (rubydev)" <james@...>
Date: 2001-12-08T02:46:20+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:27825] RE:  servlets and server pages for Ruby???

I've been working with servlets & JSP, and they are a pain in the ass.
Magazine's hype them, but I believe that's done to sell more magazines.

Essentially, JSPs ARE servlets; all of the HTML gets converted to
 System.out.println("your HTML here");
when executed.  JSPs are turned into servlet source code, then compiled.

Debugging these things is annoying, as all sorts of system and servlet
classes turn up in the stack trace, but you don't have the source
to see what the real problem is.  (Note: this is not as bad as working with
and debugging EJBs, which is a serious time killer.)

There are some neat things in JSPs, like custom tag libraries, but they
look more like a solution in search of a problem.

I've had better success using JSPs as thin UI code that hands all business
logic off to standard Java classes.  The core classes are easier to write, 
debug, and reuse.

(Disclaimer:  Working with JSPs, servlets, and assorted J2EE crap wasn't 
my prefered option, so I may be biased.)

eRuby and mod_ruby may serve your purposes.  
I've worked with ruby-tmpl (http://ruby-tmpl.sourceforge.net/),
which is quite nice.  You can build the pages using templates,
and have back-end logic handled by regular Ruby classes

(I believe there are other Ruby template libraries; check the RAA.)

If you're using IIS, you might want to try ActiveScriptRuby,
which you can use as an ASP language in place of VBScript/JScript.
However, I don't know how stable it is.
http://www.geocities.co.jp/SiliconValley-PaloAlto/9251/ruby/main.html