Some thoughts: PhP is for general-purpose web application development, but somewhat targeted at building "higher traffic dynamic webpages", although it is much

Some thoughts: PhP is for general-purpose web application development, but somewhat targeted at building "higher traffic dynamic webpages", although it is much more than that. It's widely used, and it's been around a good while. It isn't going away, and I'm not trying to convince you to stop using it. Ruby by itself is a fascinating language that developers should get familiar with. Why? IMO, primarily because of this: http://scotland-on-rails.s3.amazonaws.com/2A04_DaveThomas-SOR.mp4 http://scotland-on-rails.s3.amazonaws.com/2A04_DaveThomas-SO... But Ruby on its own is a bit like Java, Perl, etc. It isn't really web-oriented. Rails however is a framework that uses Ruby and bundles code that makes working with/storing data, web forms, etc. easier. On the surface, unlike PhP, Rails seems to have a mindset of its own, attempting to get you to use conventions that try to put webapps more into a box, so you can develop faster once you learn the box, whereas PhP alone is more wide-open. However, almost immediately you learn that box is almost entirely imagined. Ruby is even more wide-open than PhP, so Rails is also. It might be hard to get a picture of the sheer amount of functionality available for Ruby on (and off) Rails via http://rubygems.org/ http://rubygems.org/ and http://github.com/ http://github.com/ but trust me- there is a lot! The same can be said for PhP as well, but it isn't packaged up quite the same. RoR tries (notice I said tries) to make things simple. So developers get pulled in and make rookie mistakes because the details are glossed over that aren't glossed over in Java, etc. as much. I've seen and been told of PhP developed by those that didn't know what they were doing that is the same way, though. I agree that nobody "needs" Rails, but spend some more time with it, and you'll find you'll use it more than PhP for some applications.