# Ruby Online **URL:** \ **Category:** Ruby\ **Created:** [October 20, 2007, 6:47am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-online/117786 "2007-10-20T06:47:30Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 8\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![superfly](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/s/48db29/32.png) [@superfly](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/superfly)\ **Post date:** [October 20, 2007, 6:47am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-online/117786/1 "2007-10-20T06:47:30Z")
I have a code that I would just like to place on a webpage. Do I NEED ruby on rails to do that? Can I just copy the code I have paste it in some special HTML code and it’ll work? All this program does is puts out words. It does not need user input or anything like that. ---
**Author:** ![superfly](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/s/48db29/32.png) [@superfly](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/superfly)\ **Post date:** [October 20, 2007, 7:35am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-online/117786/2 "2007-10-20T07:35:56Z")
Quoth Tj Superfly: > I have a code that I would just like to place on a webpage. Do I NEED > ruby on rails to do that? Can I just copy the code I have paste it in > some special HTML code and it’ll work? > > All this program does is puts out words. It does not need user input or > anything like that. Take a look at ERuby, and/or CGI. HTH, ---
**Author:** ![superfly](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/s/48db29/32.png) [@superfly](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/superfly)\ **Post date:** [October 20, 2007, 8:38am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-online/117786/3 "2007-10-20T08:38:42Z")
Tj Superfly wrote: > I have a code that I would just like to place on a webpage. Do I NEED > ruby on rails to do that? Can I just copy the code I have paste it in > some special HTML code and it’ll work? html is for displaying text. If you want to display your code, you can do that. hml doesn’t execute anything. ---
**Author:** ![superfly](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/s/48db29/32.png) [@superfly](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/superfly)\ **Post date:** [October 20, 2007, 8:51am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-online/117786/4 "2007-10-20T08:51:12Z")
7stud – wrote: > html is for displaying text. If you want to display your code, you can > do that. html doesn’t execute anything. On second thought, html does have and tags that allow you to execute some java code, and of course browsers understand javascript and flash. So, there might be a way to execute some Ruby code employing some advanced techniques. ---
**Author:** ![superfly](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/s/48db29/32.png) [@superfly](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/superfly)\ **Post date:** [October 20, 2007, 7:26pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-online/117786/5 "2007-10-20T19:26:15Z")
Yea, thanks. I basically just want to be able to go to a website and it’ll automatically run the program when the page is loaded and then give me the information I need. I’m still hunting. ---
**Author:** ![superfly](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/s/48db29/32.png) [@superfly](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/superfly)\ **Post date:** [October 20, 2007, 8:02pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-online/117786/6 "2007-10-20T20:02:57Z")
On Sun, Oct 21, 2007 at 02:26:14AM +0900, Tj Superfly wrote: > Yea, thanks. I basically just want to be able to go to a website and > it’ll automatically run the program when the page is loaded and then > give me the information I need. > > I’m still hunting. Look into eruby implementations. If you’re on a webhosting account that includes Rails support, it should also provide Ruby support. With Ruby support, you can stick an eruby executable in the cgi-bin and use that to execute inline Ruby code in your markup. More details of how this is used can be found in the free, online edition of the Pickaxe book: [Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide](http://www.ruby-doc.org/docs/ProgrammingRuby/html/web.html) Scroll down to the part that mentions “Embedding Ruby in HTML” for some details. If this looks like the solution you want, ask for more specifics about how to get eruby running, if you don’t figure it out for yourself through Google. If you’re interested in using Ruby CGI scripts, that page should help a bit with that as well. I use eruby for some web development myself. It’s pretty easy to get along with. ---
**Author:** ![superfly](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/s/48db29/32.png) [@superfly](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/superfly)\ **Post date:** [October 20, 2007, 8:43pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-online/117786/7 "2007-10-20T20:43:06Z")
Basically, it’s a simple program like this: list = [] number = rand(list.length) puts list[number] I obviously have things in my array, but that’s the extent of the program. Just to randomly put out something from my array. So no, I’m not even trying to create a website, I’m just looking for a way to put programs on the web for anyone to access and run. ---
**Author:** ![superfly](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/s/48db29/32.png) [@superfly](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/superfly)\ **Post date:** [October 20, 2007, 8:31pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-online/117786/8 "2007-10-20T20:31:36Z")
On Oct 20, 2007, at 12:26 PM, Tj Superfly wrote: > Yea, thanks. I basically just want to be able to go to a website and > it’ll automatically run the program when the page is loaded and then > give me the information I need. > > I’m still hunting. > > – > Posted via [http://www.ruby-forum.com/](http://www.ruby-forum.com/). that’s pretty vague still. You want to run a program in the client (web browser) or on the server (host of the web site)? You want a dynamically generated site ( parts of the site)? If so, there are some things to learn. Not terribly difficult, but you will have to learn to do some things. You will need more specific details of what you want to do. For dynamic sites, you could write the program in just about any language, though some are not very practical. Interpreted languages are most popular for this sort of thing, such as Perl, PHP, Python and Ruby, but you could do it in C, C++, Java, SmallTalk, or almost anything. Some will be easier to use than others. Nobody writes everything, it’s not practical. Libraries are used. Some libraries are more extensive than others. Some libraries are more coherently focused on web development than others. Some libraries are more focused into a system of development and are called ‘frameworks’. Rails is a web development framework (or system) written in Ruby. There are others, such as IOWA and Merb and Camping, all done in Ruby. Maypole is a framwork in Perl. Symfony and Cake are PHP frameworks. Seaside is a Smalltalk framework. Plone and Django o are Python frameworks. Struts is a Java framework. All of these are examples of web development frameworks. Each language has libraries of functions/methods/constants/etc… for things like web development or image processing or file manipulation. Examples are Ruby DBI, or Perl DBI, which are similar libraries in those languages for interfacing with a database. Frameworks make use of existing libraries for a language and generally add additional libraries that are (often) specific to that framework and language. Frameworks also include a design methodology that ties all of those things together with the goal of creating writing software quickly and hopefully not having to recreate the same things again and again, focusing on creating common things easily (an example is the concept of CRUD applications, Create, Retrieve, Update, Destroy data, most applications are CRUD apps that do those things with some kind of data store, usually a database like MySQL, Oracle, or SQLite, but possibly a text file, or even many files in the operating system.) Now for web site development, you have some choices. PHP is a language that was originally designed around web site development. It has a lot of libraries and functions that are geared toward web development. Therefore, it has become quite popular. However, it hasn’t had a lot of free, open-source frameworks available and popular. Most often people have developed their own proprietary frameworks with PHP. Python, Perl, and Ruby have all been more general in nature from the beginning. These languages also have libraries that are geared toward things like web development, but these languages also have libraries geared toward doing other things as well. Rails has been the killer-app for Ruby. It just happens to be a very well designed web development framework that has inspired more than a few frameworks in other languages as well. (symfony and cake borrow many ideas from Rails) Those frameworks are great if you use PHP, but they’re missing some things. Many of the things that make Rails successful and popular are because of the Ruby language itself. Ruby tends to facilitate good design and readability. Each language has its own strengths. Perl has traditionally been the king of processing text and has some incredibly extensive libraries. Perl was the original CGI scripting language because of its text processing abilities and the fact that web servers were originally managed by systems administrators who also used Perl for lots of system admin tasks. Python has similar qualities of Perl and Ruby. Some people simply prefer Python over Ruby or vice versa. Your choice of language, libraries and frameworks should be based on personal taste and practical needs and capabilities. If you’re starting out, you can’t go wrong. If you already know a programming language you might want to go with web development in the same or a similar language. That said, Ruby is not tough to learn and has a great community, and I’d say the same for Python. Perl can be a little tougher to learn because it is a little more cryptic, but it also has a great community. PHP is not tough to learn, but it is a lot less graceful than Ruby, Perl or Python. The PHP community is not always so kind. There are lots of jobs with PHP, but there is a lot of really badly designed software in PHP that is in use in companies too. From personal experience, I can assure you, maintaining or working with other people’s code can be a pain. Open source and free software is wonderful, but has a (usually well-deserved) reputation for being messy and confusing. Ruby (and Python) tends to be really clean and fairly easy to read and maintain. PHP is usually a good example of mess. Perl is just very easy to make things very cryptic. You might do well to browse a bookstore on some of these frameworks.