Last night I attended Northern Virginia Java Users' Group (NoVaJUG) to see presentations from Tom Copeland the author of PMD Applied and the highly esteemed Dave Thomas of the Pragmatic Programmers.
I've previously mentioned Ruby On Rails over on CodeSnipers and I simply wasn't convinced. I have seen and heard the hype but it just didn't appeal to me. In fact, in some ways I was mentally fighting it. I know ASP, Java/JSP, PHP, and enough of a few other things to be dangerous. Well, Dave may have turned me with his demonstration and presentation.
Therefore, I'm going to give it a try.
My main concern that I see at this point is the fact that there are huge existing codebases of Java (my biggest customer), PHP (dotProject, SugarCRM, Mantis), etc that I interact with on a daily basis. In order to utilize this underlying functionality (ie. investment), I will have to figure out ways of calling this code (SOAP? REST? other?). For systems that are new from the ground up, the requirement isn't there, but that is a rare occassion. Fortunately, I've already heard a bit about jRuby and how it may bridge the Java/Ruby gap for me.
I'll update this space regularly with my experiments, successes, and failures.