Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

Recently I was invited to present Ruby on Rails as a rapid Web application development platform at an ODU ACM meeting. I have divided the session into three phases: presentation followed by live example application development and Q&A. The example application was a simple RESTful database driven application to store attendees' record with several attributes of various data-types. I started the presentation with an overview of Ruby language . Ruby is a fairly new general purpose multi-paradigm (including functional, object oriented, imperative and reflective) language, with syntax inspired by Python , Smalltalk and many other languages. Ruby is designed for programmer productivity and fun hence, its primary focus is human rather than computer needs. This philosophy goes very well with the rapidly changing client needs. Often by the time programers are done with the application development as per the specifications, the client's needs have already changed. Hence, R