Ruby on Rails has tools that make common development tasks easier “out of the box”, such as scaffolding that can automatically build up some of the models and views needed for a basic website. Also included are WEBrick, a plain Ruby web server that is dispersing with Ruby, and Rake, a build system, distributed as a gem. Composed with Ruby on Rails, these tools provide a primary development environment.

Ruby on Rails is most generally not connected to the Internet directly, but through some front-end web server. Mongrel was commonly chosen over “WEBrick” in the early days but it can also run on Lighttpd, Apache, Cherokee, Hiawatha, nginx, and many others. After 2008, the web server change to Mongrel as the most-used web server for Ruby on Rails. Ruby is also supported on the IBM.

Ruby on Rails is also important for its comprehensive use of the JavaScript libraries Prototype and “Script.aculo.us” for Ajax. Ruby was originally applying lightweight SOAP for web services; this was later replaced by RESTful web services. Ruby on Rails 3.0 uses a technique called inconspicuous JavaScript to isolate the functionality (or logic) from the structure of the web page. jQuery is fully supported as a substitute for Prototype and is the default JavaScript library in Rails 3.1, giving back an industry-wide move towards jQuery. Futhermore, CoffeeScript was introduced in Rails 3.1 as the default Javascript language.