web development with ruby without rails?

Question

For reasons beyond my control, I'm being tasked with Ruby web development that does NOT use Rails or really any other heavyweight framework such as Merb. I'm wondering if anybody else has encountered this and can recommend best practices or resources that describe best practices for such a problem. I'd like to avoid the dreaded

 out.print('<td class="foo">'+some_data+'</td>')

style of web development. A coworker has suggested Rack as a light framework but the documentation is sketchy and it seems unproven in the market.

Answer 1

Take a look at Sinatra. It's a framework, but not that heavy.

Answer 2

Look at Rack and Sinatra or Waves. Rack is not unproven in the market. Rails is built on top of rack these days! It also isn't a framework, it allows frameworks to focus on their differentiator rather than the low level busy work.

You can also use jruby and the java servlet api directly. btw, all the rack based frameworks can easily be run on jruby.