Assuming you have even just a little background in programming with any language there are four basic programs and extensions that you need but are provided by the quick installers you’ve just downloaded to your hard drive. You have The Ruby programming language program files, the Rails part of the programming extension/platform, MySql or your database query handling system and the Apache which is a web server that you use to emulate your application’s execution on the web. Granting you have these set up properly and tested (instructions for which are included in the installer package). You can now start building your first application with RoR.

There are several alternative implementations and completion of the Ruby language as of 2008 including JRuby, Rubinius, IronRuby and YARV. Each of them has different approach especially that JRuby provides just-in-time compilation functionality. JIT or just-in-time compilation is also known as Dynamic Translation. In computing, it is a system and a technique for improving runtime performance of a computer program. It has two earlier ideas in run-time environments such as dynamic compilation and bytecode compilation. Its advantage over statically compiling the code at development time is that it can recompile the code and its ability to enforce security guarantees. Hence it can merge a few of the advantages of interpretation and static compilation.