Build a Wiki System with Rails

he Ruby language and the Ruby on Rails (Rails for short) web application framework have created a lot of buzz in the software programming industry and for good reason. While Ruby has been around for more than a decade, the Rails framework is relatively new but it is becoming a darling of many programmers who are tired of the overly complicated world of web frameworks.

This article demonstrates just how easy it is to write a simple Wiki application using Ruby and Rails together. While Rails is used mostly to build database applications, this article goes the file-based persistence route because I personally like using Wiki systems that are file based and coincidentally they are easy to set up. In addition, very few resources on the web discuss developing non-database applications using Rails. Still, switching to a database using the Rails database support should be relatively painless if you choose to go that route.