Christoph, let’s be real here; how many people out there are really building Ruby web apps without Rails? (Or Ruby apps at all, for that matter?) Is such a thing even possible on DreamHost?

@Albrigh:

You would be surprised! Especially since Christian Neukirchen’s awesome Rack.

I love Ruby. I very much like Rails, especially for the part it’s played in helping me to learn Ruby and … cause it’s just plain awesome.

That said … I don’t write many Rails apps. That’s mostly because of the resources they require, which is pretty ridiculous, and also because I typically just don’t need all of the overhead and the things Rails does. I’m happy working closer to the “real code.”

Lots of developers are writing apps using either Rack-compatible web frameworks, or using Rack, itself. Support Rack and you can easily run your site using CGI, FastCGI, Mongrel/Thin … or anything that has a Rack handler.

You would also be surprised about the number of people using Ruby ‘off rails’ or off the web, in general. It’s a good general purpose programming language. All you have to do is watch/browse Rubyforge to see all of the various thing people are doing.

Also, I like me frameworks that support Rack because it means it’ll run OK on dreamhost :)

Also, I dunno how people so easily overlook things like … eruby? Dreamhost has information about it in its wiki. It’s basically PHP-style development for Ruby. I’ve build sites that I would’ve used PHP for in Ruby, using eruby (on dreamhost) and I’ve had great experiences with it.

YMMV, but I think DreamHost may be scrimping on per/user RAM or some such, if this is such a big headache for them. I think extrapolating from one host’s experiences to a major problem with the Rails application stack (& core team) is a bit of a stretch.