Section 19.1. CGI Programming with Ruby

Chapter 19. Ruby and Web Applications

O, what a tangled web we weave...!

Sir Walter Scott, The Lay of the Last Minstrel

Ruby is a general-purpose language; it can't properly be called a "web language" at all. Even so, web applications (and web tools in general) are among the most common uses of Ruby.

There are many ways to do web development in Ruby, from toolkits and libraries that are small and low-level to frameworks that virtually dictate your style of coding and thinking.

Let's begin at the low end. We'll look first at the cgi.rb library that is standard in Ruby.