Ruby and Ruby on Rails

Ruby

Ruby is an object oriented, interpreted, programming language first released in 1995 by Yukihiro Matsumoto (a.k.a. “Matz”).

The Ruby language is designed to make programming easy, allowing programmers to concentrate on solving the problem instead of mastering the language.
Since its first release the language has gained much support of a vibrant opensource community and reached a popularity matching (and for some, surpassing) Perl, Python and PHP.

More information on Ruby can be found here.

Ruby On Rails

Ruby On Rails is a framework written in Ruby (duh!) that makes it (a lot) easier to develop, test, deploy and maintain web applications.

Remedy IT uses Ruby and Ruby on Rails and its extensive library of plugins (Rails specific extensions) and gems (generic Ruby extensions) to build state of the art Inter- and Intranet solutions.
The excellent built-in Javascript support in Ruby on Rails makes this an ideal development platform for Web 2.0 enabled solutions.
Ruby On Rails also offers fully integrated support for building RESTful (REST: Representational State Transfer) webservices using resource based routing.

Ruby On Rails also offers an integrated ORM for SQL databases through the ActiveRecord component and comes with a broad set of adapters for most commonly used relational database servers like MySQL, SQLite, Postgres, Oracle, MSSQL, Sybase.

Application logic can be cleanly separated from business rules and presentation logic using the Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture. The object oriented nature of the Rails implementation of this architecture naturally promotes reuse of common functionality, be it at the model, view or controller level.
DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) development is a key concept behind the design of Ruby on Rails.

The availability of high quality RAD environments like the NetBeans and Eclipse IDEs (supporting integrated development, testing and deployment) combined with the ease of use of an interpreted language creates an ideal environment for Agile application development.

More information on Ruby On Rails can be found here.