query regarding Ruby

Question

I am a fresher as far as Ruby is concerned. i worked in PHP for sometime. I was wondering if there is some pakage like LAMP or WAMP as in case of PHP for Ruby too......

If not at least suggest me the best setup or IDE for Ruby

Thanx in advance

Answer 1

There is something like: rubystack, if this is what you are looking for (rails development).

BitNami RubyStack greatly simplifies the development and deployment of Ruby on Rails applications. It includes ready-to-run versions of Apache, MySQL, Ruby and Rails and required dependencies. It can be deployed using a native installer, as a virtual machine or in the cloud.

Netbeans, an IDE coming from the java world has ruby support: http://wiki.netbeans.org/Ruby.

Answer 2

Windows

If you use Windows, the easiest way to get Ruby working is via the RubyInstaller. If you only want to work on Ruby, Ruby 1.9.1 is your choice. Otherwise, if you want to experiment with Rails, you should try to install Ruby 1.8.7.

There's also a BitNami Ruby stack but it contains much more stuff than Ruby itself. You don't really need Apache or MySQL to work with Ruby on your local machine because you can use Mongrel and SQLite. In this way, you don't have to bother with additional background processes.

Avoid using Ruby 1.8.6. It's old and it's not convenient to start studying with an outdated Ruby version.

Mac OS X

Ruby comes installed by default with Leopard and Show Leopard. If you want a different Ruby version, I suggest to use RVM.

Linux

You can install Ruby by source or with your system package manager.

Answer 3

The Rails framework is a great setup for doing web development, and I would highly recommend RadRails as your IDE or it's base, Aptana.