Instant Rails is a one-stop Rails runtime solution containing Ruby, Rails, Apache, and MySQL, all pre-configured and ready to run. No installer, you simply drop it into the directory of your choice and run it. It does not modify your system environment. See the Release Notes for a complete list of what is included.

The original version of this tutorial was written by Curt Hibbs and published on ONLamp.com. It served as my introduction to both Ruby and Rails. Unfortunately, I experienced some frustration working through it. This was due first to the fact that I was using Instant Rails, not Rails, and second, to the fact that Rails itself has grown since Curt wrote the article. Despite my frustration, the payoff was huge. Ruby on [Instant]Rails ROCKS!!! In an effort to help "fuel the fire" I decided, with his blessing, to update Curt's article to make it 100% keystroke-for-keystroke, window-for-window accurate for someone using this same tutorial for InstantRails Release 1.0 installed on Windows 2000, SP4.

I thought I'd have a noodle around and came up with a quick and simple Web chatroom in a few hours. It seems to work okay, but I've only tested on FireFox and Safari. On IE it's bound to look totally out of wack as I'm not sure it supports position: fixed, which I used for the IRC-esque layout. Anyway.. whoever's reading this, please drop by at http://www.bigbold.com/congress/ to help give this a whirl! I'll be hovering on it, so come on and say something to me

You may have already heard about Ruby on Rails, the new application framework that seems to be taking the Web development community, in particular J2EE and PHP programmers, by storm.

Rails is a capable Web application platform and has, in less than two years, gained significant traction among J2EE and PHP programmers. The attraction of both J2EE and PHP programmers makes a lot of sense when you look at the strengths of Rails. For one thing, it uses a strict model-view-controller architecture that any self-respecting design-patterns wonk would admire—this explains its attraction to J2EE developers. Second, it’s easy to build basic systems with Rails—which is attractive to PHP developers.

While the Product Catalog example showed how easy it is to create a very simple application using Rails, it’s not all that useful except for tracking inventory. You can create much more complicated Web applications with Rails, but that will require that you jump into the code a bit, which would require some study. Rails is an easy framework to work with, but like any technology it takes time to master. At this point, I can only recommend Rails to technically-savvy individuals and development teams who are embarking on “green-field” application development. If you don’t fall into this rough category, I wouldn’t recommend using Rails until the tooling has matured.