Introduction

Just like Perl, Ruby's reach extends into the field of networking and the Web. When Perl/CGI applications popped up all over the Web, people who were not exactly expectant of the phenomenon failed to react properly. Part of the train of thought driving Ruby, on the other hand, is that it needs to be extensible in order to cover the unexpected hence we find that Ruby can swim quite well in the world of the Web.

Ruby's socket library is very robust; everything from Network Interface Card (NIC) connections to FTP connections can be configured through this library.

Ruby can also be set up to run within a server like running a standard Perl file through a couple of modules which are readily available, such as eruby and pRuby. There are even a couple of small servers out there that run on pure Ruby.

In this chapter, we'll develop a Web-based, database-driven online-shop application, at first taking a CGI/FastCGI approach, then rewrite the same utilizing mod_ruby and eruby; finally we'll implement it using Interpreted Objects for Web Applications (IOWA), Ruby's powerful application server. Furthermore, we'll show how to apply mod_ruby and eruby for rendering RDF Site Summary (RSS) news channels to an HTML representation or to dynamically generate XML. In the last section, we'll implement a reusable and attractive tree-view component for IOWA.

Go to www.syngress.com/solutions for supplemental material: "Writing a TCP/IP-based server in Ruby" and "Parsing and Creating HTML with Ruby."

Connecting to the Web with Ruby

Like any...