Im struggling to find good material about developing web applications in Ruby without using a framework such as Rails or Merb in the usual places (I’ve already spent a while on Google, Safari books online and stackoverflow looking!). I have nothing against the frameworks at all; just my intended architecture is a little different and so doesnt fit well.
Can you give some recommendations on resources you have found useful?
You should give Sinatra a try. It’s a framework, but a minimalistic one, so you can easily see what is going on under the hood.
Other than that maybe the CGI Ruby library is a place to look into.