1) You don't have to stay up to date with the latest. Pick a version and hunker down. I.e. 2.3.11. Forget about Rails3 for a year or 2 if you like (not me, I ha

1) You don't have to stay up to date with the latest. Pick a version and hunker down. I.e. 2.3.11. Forget about Rails3 for a year or 2 if you like (not me, I happen to really like rails 3). This is what I'd do if I was a part-time rails dev. 2) This couldn't be more incorrect. I'm not sure where you got this impression, but I have several apps in production I haven't touch in over a year. I don't even think I've bounced any services like apache or passenger on that box in over a year. I didn't do anything fancy to make this possible. Are you constantly upgrading your apps when new versions come out? Would you do that with a production EJB app? 3) This is true, but isn't specific to Rails or Ruby developers. One thing I'll say is that Rails 3 definitely has a higher learning curve than 1 or 2 did. I think that's just the framework growing up though. It's a pretty complicated area of development if you want to build a decent sized app. If you're building something really simple and small, rails 3 might be overkill, at least for the time being until it settles down a bit.