Iowa and Cerise were running production apps before Rails. Nitro came out at the same time as Rails. (There may be more, but I'd have to go look it up. They're described in The Ruby Way 2nd ed.)
Rolling your own request-handler+template thing is not hard. Nor is using DBI. Having stuff all bundled up is a big win, but it's not something essential. Ruby's a clean, fun language.
"Until Rails, people mostly wrote CGI-style applications."
Well, maybe that was prevalent with Ruby (whose mod_ruby is/was iffy), but mod_php was damn near everywhere before Rails.
Rolling your own request-handler+template thing is not hard. Nor is using DBI. Having stuff all bundled up is a big win, but it's not something essential. Ruby's a clean, fun language.
"Until Rails, people mostly wrote CGI-style applications."
Well, maybe that was prevalent with Ruby (whose mod_ruby is/was iffy), but mod_php was damn near everywhere before Rails.