I don't really have much to say about Ruby or Rails that hasn't been said by many people before; I just have my experience of it, which I think is more valuable than the technical minutiae.

I think the biggest strength of Rails (and Ruby for that matter) isn't the framework. It's the community.

The framework solves the problem it's supposed to solve. The community is all aligned around an agile mindset. As such, there's not the "There's more than one way to do it" philosophy of Perl. Instead, the philosophy is "How do we make this simple, flexible and easy to build on?" When you're working along the same assumptions, Rails makes it very, very easy to do what you want. The community supports that, not just with tutorials, but with podcasts, screencasts, and books.

However, if you're doing something that isn't in that set of assumptions -- if you have legacy data or non-Railsy database schema and associations -- you're off the map. In a way, this was good because I got to figure out how Rails really works, but it was certainly a dunk in cold water after having so much help available.

This has been something I've wanted to do for years. Gave up some features for it; no automatic java syntax highlighting, no full text search, and no filtering by categories. But I've got the bones, and I can work on the flesh later. Now, sleep.