Let me make this clear. I looooves the Ruby. But it has a HUGE problem. I feel this a lot as I'm not a programmer. I'm a system administrator for an ISP. Everyone that has ever done that job knows that it includes a fair bit of programming. Hundreds of parsers need to be written. Hundreds of converters. Tens of little cron jobs to do this and that. A bunch of webpages so the customer service can look up logs, reset passwords, delete records and so on. And my ISP has just started being a VoIP service as well so the number of coding doubles for that. But let's not kid ourselves. Ruby web applications have a HUGE deployment problem.

mod_ruby

It's amazing mod_ruby hasn't been fixed. Yeah I know there are many ways around it. Set up proxy service in Apache that uses pen and mongrel processes etc. Or you switch to Litespeed or some other server. But that is avoiding the problem. Although I like using Litespeed at home I just don't have that luxury at work. Because I might have to use the same server to host a subversion repo for example. There is a reason Apache is loved by ISPs. Apache is a one size fits all solution. Apache can do just about everything. Except host Rails application. And I mean really host it. Not just redirect to another service. So let's make this clear. Ruby and Ruby on rails will NEVER grow up to the size of PHP, not even half, until you can just upload it to a server and it just works. Hosting companies and ISPs just cannot offer RoR hosting until this is fixed. I know there are a few that support it(kinda) but until there is mod_ruby or mod_rails available then we have a problem. Also if the same guy could make mod_camping then he I can name a few system administrators that would kiss his feet.

A sidenote of my hate of net/telnet

Sorry. It's just broken. net/telnet works fine if only thing you want is to telnet to another fresh linux computer and execute some command. But you actually never need to do that. You use telnet when you need to run some commands on some telephoning server written in 1975 that only worries about one standard... It's own. I had the other day to write a command that logs into a telnet server, lists files, and downloads them to local for processing. And those are hundreds of files. I tried every trick net/telnet had but in the end I had to do such an ugly cheat that I still feel sick thinking about it.