Ruby Overview

Ruby is a pure object-oriented programming language. It was created in 1993 by Yukihiro Matsumoto of Japan.
 

What is Ruby?

Before we ride on Rails, let us recapitulate a few points of Ruby, which is the base of Rails.
Ruby is the successful combination of −

• Smalltalk's conceptual elegance,
• Python's ease of use and learning, and
• Perl's pragmatism.
  

Ruby is −

• A high-level programming language.
• Interpreted like Perl, Python, Tcl/TK.
• Object-oriented like Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, Java.
  

Why Ruby?

Ruby originated in Japan and now it is gaining popularity in US and Europe as well. The following factors contribute towards its popularity −

• Easy to learn
• Open source (very liberal license)
• Rich libraries
• Very easy to extend
• Truly object-oriented
• Less coding with fewer bugs
• Helpful community

 Features of Ruby

• Ruby is an open-source and is freely available on the Web, but it is subject to a license.
• Ruby is a general-purpose, interpreted programming language.
• Ruby is a true object-oriented programming language.
• Ruby is a server-side scripting language similar to Python and PERL.
• Ruby can be used to write Common Gateway Interface (CGI) scripts.
• Ruby can be embedded into Hypertext Markup Language (HTML).
• Ruby has a clean and easy syntax that allows a new developer to learn Ruby very quickly and easily.
• Ruby has similar syntax to that of many programming languages such as C++ and Perl.
• Ruby is very much scalable and big programs written in Ruby are easily maintainable.
• Ruby can be used for developing Internet and intranet applications.
• Ruby can be installed in Windows and POSIX environments.
• Ruby support many GUI tools such as Tcl/Tk, GTK, and OpenGL.
• Ruby can easily be connected to DB2, MySQL, Oracle, and Sybase.
• Ruby has a rich set of built-in functions, which can be used directly into Ruby scripts.

Although we have many reasons to use Ruby, there are a few drawbacks as well that you may have to consider before implementing Ruby −

• Performance Issues − Although it rivals Perl and Python, it is still an interpreted language and we cannot compare it with high-level programming languages like C or C++.
  
• Threading model − Ruby does not use native threads. Ruby threads are simulated in the VM rather than running as native OS threads.