With regard to your last statement about templating: Rails uses ERb (part of the standard library) for .rhtml templates and Builder for .rxml. The ERb syntax is simple, just embedded Ruby code with typical <% %> and <%= %> delimiters, and the templates have access to the controller's instance variables. Most templates are located automatically, under app/views/<controller>/<action>.r(html|xml).
On deployment: I think everyone just gravitates to FastCGI and lighttpd eventually because the combination does work pretty well for the Rails applications that are out there so far. The main sticking point for mod_ruby seems to be that it reuses one Ruby interpreter instance for all hits handled by a particular child process, so running multiple Rails apps on it at once is potentially unsafe. While that limitation makes it unsuitable for shared hosting, it should work just fine on a dedicated server, if that is the environment in which your app is going to end up.
by Rob — Jun 30
On deployment: I think everyone just gravitates to FastCGI and lighttpd eventually because the combination does work pretty well for the Rails applications that are out there so far. The main sticking point for mod_ruby seems to be that it reuses one Ruby interpreter instance for all hits handled by a particular child process, so running multiple Rails apps on it at once is potentially unsafe. While that limitation makes it unsuitable for shared hosting, it should work just fine on a dedicated server, if that is the environment in which your app is going to end up.