Have you already heard about Ruby (nothing to do with jewels) or Rails Development (nothing to do with trains) or Ruby on Rails? These buzwords are very strange. What is it? Where to start with to discover Ruby on Rails?

First, Ruby is an open-source language (yes, a new one...) created in 1993-1995 by Yukihiro Matsumoto, aka Matz, a Japanese free software programmer. To start with Ruby, you should go here to learn about its features. And there is also an interview of Matz.

Then, you have Ruby on Rails, an open-source web framework based on Ruby language. The goal of Ruby on Rails is very ambitious: to accelerate by ten times the time needed to develop a web-based application! Ruby on Rails has been developped by 37signals, the company that also makes Ta-da list (see my note on it here) and Basecamp, a project-management tool. Ta-da and Basecamp have been developped using Ruby on Rails.