Ruby without rails as a web server

[yovav9]

Hi
I need to write a server that receives requests from clients, does
some processing and return answers.
For simplicity and firewall-tolerance, we've decided on HTTP as the
baseline protocol:
the client will send a request embedded in the query part of the URL,
and the server will return the response as text over HTTP.
We have Apache, and since we want an OO server, we're considering Ruby
(without Rails).
However, when putting an .rb file in the htdocs, the browser keeps
trying to open the file, instead of the server processing the content.
1. What are we doing wrong?
2. How can we access the client request (URL query, and possibly text)
from the Ruby script?

Thanks

 

[yovav9]

Thanks Philip,
But I seem to have forgotten to mention a crucial fact - I'm running
on Windows and not Linux/Unix...