Lab test: Climb aboard Ruby on Rails [Video]

The InfoWorld Test Center sifts through nine Rails IDEs and editors to help you choose the tools to suit your development needs

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The Ruby on Rails site bills its eponymous project as “Web development that doesn’t hurt.” I’m not really sure what that means, but it certainly sounds good.

Further down on the page, it says, “Rails is a full-stack framework for developing database-backed Web applications according to the Model-View-Control pattern. From the Ajax in the view, to the request and response in the controller, to the domain model wrapping the database, Rails gives you a pure-Ruby development environment. To go live, all you need to add is a database and a Web server.” That’s almost true.

On the Rails download page, after some basic installation instructions for installing Ruby, RubyGems (the standard Ruby package manager), and Rails, as well as some terse hints about how to get started, there’s some advice about Rails …