The sagely Nat Torkington gets to the crux of why Ruby on Rails is so hot.
Whether or not you think Rails is the bee's knees and the wasp's nipples, you have to admit that the 37 Signals crew are master marketers. In many ways, more amazing than the technology of Rails is the way these guys have created buzz and build a community by lowering barriers to entry.
I've been fascinated and inquisitive of this surge of buzz in the past few months surrounding Rails, the Ruby code framework the 37 signals team derived from their web applications. In fact, I just finished watching the movie Nat's post links to. It's quite impressive what they can do there and while Rails certain makes development more rapid and less repetitive, even more a bit more accessible, it still has some rather rough spots and geekery to it. I'm one to talk being a Perl guy. The Perl developer community as a whole has a lot to learn from Rails. (Sorry Catalyst team, it's pretty clear you're missing the point on Rails and have a long way to go.)
So while Rails biggest achievement may be its marketing, there is a lot of technology lessons to be learned and it should be seen as starting point rather than a convergence and a beginning rather than an end.
