What is ruby?

Hi,
i have never used ruby before, but i was wondering if someone would be nice enough to tell me what it is used for.

I am guessing that it is a server side site programming language, as PHP and ASP are, but why is it its own language?

I dont beleive I have ever seen any life examples and only heard of faint discussion on people using it?

Is it out of date or does it only compile on certain server or is there some specific things that only Ruby can achieve?

In other words, what makes Ruby, Ruby? and why would one chose to programme in Ruby?

Thanks for all your help!

Best regards,
Team 1504

Hi,
i have never used ruby before, but i was wondering if someone would be nice enough to tell me what it is used for.

I am guessing that it is a server side site programming language, as PHP and ASP are, but why is it its own language?

Ruby is a scripting language, like Python or Perl. It’s used server-side, most frequently as part of the Ruby on Rails and Sinatra frameworks, but can also be used for writing scripts to run locally.

I dont beleive I have ever seen any life examples and only heard of faint discussion on people using it?

Twitter was originally built in Ruby on Rails, as was Hulu. All the 37signals apps (basecamp, highrise, etc.) are built in Rails, so are GitHub, Shopify, getSatisfaction, and tons of other high-profile sites.

Is it out of date or does it only compile on certain server or is there some specific things that only Ruby can achieve?

Definitely not out of date, it’s under active development. It’s interpreted, so it doesn’t compile at all (like PHP). I don’t think there’s anything that only Ruby can achieve (other than making programmers happy :wink: )

In other words, what makes Ruby, Ruby? and why would one chose to programme in Ruby?

Most people who like ruby like it because it has very short and readable syntax (compared with the more spaghetti-like PHP), and because it’s purely object oriented: everything in Ruby is an object, and behaves like an object.

Many of the key selling points are summarized on the Ruby site’s about page:

http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/about/

Hope that helped! Let me know if you have more questions!

Ruby is a scripting language like php or python. It is fully object oriented and also has a very compact syntax

Thank you! I have currently decided to learn Perl and then probably Ruby (without rails) and lastly Python.
I love Ruby’s syntax but dislike Python’s only one way to do something because I am creative. However I love Python’s applications especially with GUI. Hmm who knows what ill choose after Perl

Thanks & Best Regards,
Team 1504

Hi Team 1504,

With the hep of ruby,

  1. We can able to Upload N number of video files automatically at a time in to Youtube account.

  2. Both of the links demonstrated that functionality.

  3. Automatically open browsers,fill forms,read data from Excel/Text/Doc/Video files and fill/upload in to youtube.

Thanks

Hi,
Could you help me understyand what each of those links are supposed to do?

Thanks in advance,
Team 1504

Hi team1504,

   Thanks. With the help of ruby we can do the following things

http://bit.ly/j_demo_watir
http://bit.ly/j_demo_watir2

I am sure Ruby is little bit best with Perl for scripting purpose.

Thanks
Raveendran
<snip/>

Hello jazzezravi— welcome to sitepoint! Thank you for answering my question as your First post.
I am currently debating between perl & Ruby (not on rails not yet)

Ruby – It acts like oops language like Java,C++ and also acts like scripting language such as Perl, Python.

Rails is the killer application. Except Rails, ruby has nearly 40 most importnat libraries in it.
They ar esuch as ,

Watir
Selenium
Cucumber
Bret-Watircraft
Etc…,

Is that true? Team decided on Perl, which I know does compile (sometimes, in parts or in whole, depending on what you’re doing… giving you both compile-time errors and run-time errors) and Python does something similar (both compile to byte-code). Are there no compiling parts of Ruby?