I’ve just begun on my quest to learn Ruby on Rails, a fairly new language (Ruby) and web development framework (Rails) targeted at writing content driven web sites. I’ve used many different programming languages, and several different web frameworks, and boy is this powerful. Today I wrote my first Rails web site, a simple to-do list. Guess how much coding this required. That’s right, one line. Try beating that with PHP, Perl or Java.
I have the feeling that most of the success of Rails comes from scriptalicious and script.aculo.us and prototype, which are simply very effective javascript libraries. You can keep using bash or php for the server side.