[Cialug] Iowa Ruby Brigade

[David W. Body]

On Sep 6, 2007, at 1:15 PM, carl-olsen at mchsi.com wrote:

> Are you going to start a discussion list like this one?

If IRB starts a discussion list, it will be in addition to the  
current announce-only list.  Whether we do that will be a topic of  
discussion at our September 20 meeting.  There are already lots of  
Ruby resources out there, including mailing lists, and I don't want  
to start another one unless there is a need.  The current IRB mailing  
list is announce-only because some people avoid subscribing to  
certain lists (including this one, believe it or not) that have more  
than a minimal amount of traffic.

>
> I hate to tie up this list with a Ruby question, but I'm curious.
>
> I have the ASP.NET framework installed on my windows computers and  
> Java (NetBeans has its own built-in web server) and PHP on my linux  
> computers (I had mono on the linux boxes but got tired of  
> configuring it all the time when they released the updates  
> frequently).
>
> Can I install Ruby on any kind of operating system and will it  
> interfere with anything I currently have running?  Can pages have  
> both Ruby code and some other programming language code in them?

This is exactly what we'll be discussing at our September 20 meeting  
(Getting Started with Ruby).  But to answer your questions, Ruby can  
be installed on almost any operating system (including Linux, OS X,  
and Windows) and Ruby can coexist with everything you mentioned.   
Ruby is generally easy to install, and uninstall without leaving a  
trace.  In this regard Ruby is more like Perl, Python, and PHP, and  
less like ASP.NET.

I'm not aware of an easy way to create web pages that mix Ruby with  
other languages, but I'm not sure I would want to do that anyway.

>
> In other words, how much work do I have to do to start playing with  
> it?
>
> Carl Olsen

You can actually start playing with it by simply pointing your  
browser here:

   http://tryruby.hobix.com/

--David