There are very few people in the software development community who haven't even heard of Ruby and rails yet. Ruby is a new programming language and rails is a framework to create MVC applications. The Ruby and Rails combination is believed to make the web application development fairly easy. Some call it better perl http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=141312 and others believe it will take over the web application development world. Time will tell the future of Ruby but for now I have decided to check it out.

As expected, the installation did NOT go smooth. This is the biggest problem with any non Microsoft tool or technology (no flames please!). It is very hard to make something work right out of the box. If you follow all the links and install everything per the article, you should know the following:

1. One click Ruby installer ruby182-14.exe comes with RubyGems 0.8.3 (RubyGems is a package manager about which I don't know much)
2. If you use the command 'gem install rails -- remote' it will quietly NOT work meaning, the command will run, it will install some documentation but it will NOT install the rails framework and other necessary frameworks
3. http://www.artima.com/forums/flat.jsp?forum=123&thread=141027 tells you that you need gems version 0.8.11 or later for the installation to work
4. You can go to http://docs.rubygems.org/read/chapter/3 page to understand how to update gem package
5. Once the package is updated, everything will work

1. Follow the article until it asks you to issue 'gem install rails --remote' command
2. Before issuing that command, use 'gem install rubygems-update' AND 'update_rubygems' commands (without single quotes) to update gems
3. Once these two commands run (ay take a while), issue the command specified in the article, 'gem install rails --remote' which will also run for a while and install rails
4. From this point on you may follow the article to create an application