Frequently Asked Questions
These questions are meant help you solve specific but common problems that may pop up when using this language. They are meant to be read after you have gone through the tutorial and begin actual development.
How can I put my Ruby on Rails application on the web?
There are numerous options for hosting Ruby on Rails applications due to it's recent boon in popularity and usage. Below are what this author thinks are some of the best hosts.
If you are a University of Washington student, staff, or faculty you can follow the UW IT Connect tutorial for setting up your Ruby on Rails application for free on UW servers.
If you want a free, easy to use, but very limited host than you can try using Heroku. They also have a step by step tutorial for uploading Ruby on Rails applications. You can pay to host with them for premium features, but that can get rather expensive.
If you want a paid host that has high performance and scalability, but requires extensive knowledge of virtual servers than you can try using Amazon EC2. A great resource for this is ec2onrails, but even this tutorial requires extensive knowledge of rails. Not recommended for beginners.
Why use Rails over other widely used server side technologies such as PHP?
Rails favors a "convention over configuration" approach to software development meaning that you are forced to structure and do certain programming tasks following a single Rails convention as opposed to deciding project by project. This principle enforces best practices in software engineering even for beginners as opposed to languages like PHP which allow beginners to fall into preventable programming pitfalls. If you are interested in more reasons why check out the following link.
