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What really made me appreciate Rails is 6 years of writing web applications in PHP. I've looked at a lot of PHP frameworks during that time, and mostly I felt like they just got in my way. I developed a pseudo-MVC style for my own code that worked pretty well. However after a few years of writing PHP I felt like I was hitting a wall--PHP just isn't that great a language. Rails on the other hand uses Ruby, which is one of the best languages around, and Rails takes full advantage. Basically almost everything I learned about Rails was an immediate "ah-ha!" moment based on my years of experience with PHP. If you haven't done a lot of web programming than a lot of Rails features may not make as much sense right away, but because of its elegance I'm sure you could start your web programming career in Rails and do just fine, provided you have the necessary curiosity and attention to detail that makes the potential for a good programmer. That said, the water can get deep fast, and the only insurance is understanding Ruby. Now there's a bit of a paradox here which is that Ruby semantics can be very hard to understand, but once you do, the language is much more expressive. It lends itself to clean engineering, which makes RoR source code more concise and easier to understand than similar Java or PHP code which would be easier to understand on a line-by-line basis but would be much longer and convoluted. To add to some comments above: @WarMage - Not only is Basecamp running on RoR, RoR is extracted from Basecamp. @Blaise - Deployment is tricky. RoR must be resident in memory to perform adequately. This means that when you upload a new version you have to reload it into memory. It also means that RoR over CGI is just too slow. However, by running FastCGI and keeping all the code in memory RoR performs quite well. There is a ton of activity around deploying Rails apps, but unfortunately it's not the kind of stuff that you can just plug and play on a shared host. It takes time for hosts to develop shared-hosting friendly solutions. However, once you have deployment worked out, Rails has very convenient tools for automating deployment. [url=http://manuals.rubyonrails.com/read/book/17]Capistrano[/url] makes it so you can deploy the new version of your app to multiple servers with a single command, and also offers the ability to easily rollback the update if something breaks. My general observation of Rails is that it really makes it easy to do the 'right' thing. Often times the 'right' thing is more work than doing nothing, but you get 90% of the benefit of the overengineered enterprise-level Java solutions with only 10% of the effort. Unit testing, functional testing, development vs production environments, database migrations, ORM (ActiveRecord), and MVC separation are handled simple and elegantly in Rails. Learning RoR is worth it just for the exposure to these concepts. It's also a gateway drug to [url=http://www.seaside.st/]more new and fantastic frameworks[/url]. -jiblet
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