ActiveSalesforce (ASF) is up and ready to to try out (I am about to move the project into Beta). You do not need to use all of Rails (its very cool though) to take advantage of ASF as a powerful interface into salesforce. We are in the process of developing some demos - more for marketing than for developer education at this point because if you know Rails you know most of what you need to know to use ASF. We will also have live demos up and running from the ASF hosted site at activesalesforce.textdriven.com.

The new home page just went up over the weekend (http://activesalesforce.textdriven.com/) that includes the simple instructions to get you up and running quickly. ASF is gem installable - in fact you can start with a naked Ruby w/ gem box and with just:

gem install activesalesforce --include-dependencies

you will get everything you need (including rails itself).

I would love to get more info/details from everyone on what type of information you need to be successful using ASF!