[hulla]

What is Ruby?
What is Ruby on Rails?
Why use Ruby/Ruby on Rails over other languages?

[sepp2k]

Ruby is a dynamically typed, dynamic, general purpose, multi-paradigm programming language. Its notable features include full object orientation (i.e. every value is an object, which has a class - there are no primitive types), support for higher order methods and anonymous functions, and advanced meta-programming capabilities. It also has lots of rich and expressive string processing methods built-in (including good regular expression support) and a lot of methods for handling arrays as well.

Ruby on Rails is a web development framework written in and for ruby. It allows you to quickly develop web applications and offers a lot of built-in functionality for common tasks, allowing you to achieve those tasks quickly and without having to write loads of code.

You might consider using ruby, if you like the features listed above and appreciate a language which aims to be easy to use and concise.

You might consider using ruby on rails if you want to write a web application in ruby.

[hulla]

Thanks.

[heyoman1]

Oh Wikipedia.

Basically, it's aimed to be human readable, extensive, and easy to use. it comes with its own standard library and such. Rails is just the web framework that uses Ruby for everything.

Really, it's just a personal preference if you use them. I just prefer Ruby over Python, and Rails to Django.

This post has been edited by heyoman1: 03 September 2011 - 11:54 AM