This post is extremely confusing. As soon as you attempt to step outside of what Rails is built for Rails is a tool for building database-driven websites. It

This post is extremely confusing. As soon as you attempt to step outside of what Rails is built for Rails is a tool for building database-driven websites. It does this well, and I'm confused as to how you can "step outside of" this. Admittedly Rails probably doesn't help you built a GUI application well. or need some new piece of functionality Wait, what? How did you arrive at this conclusion? Rails doesn't ship with authentication, but there's no less than two (authlogic, restful_authentication) major frameworks for authentication, and countless smaller libraries or self-written tools. The same goes for uploading files (attachment_fu, paperclip), testing (rspec, cucumber, steak, shoulda, ...). The list goes on. Rails' active community is one of the main benefits of using Rails in the first place! Rails is painful to scale Rails is no more painful to scale than any other web framework. The bottlenecks for scaling usually come down to application design, not your ORM. Have you ever even used Rails, or have you prejudged it based on posts by people who also have never used it?