Technology Selection: Ruby on Rails

Last week I promised a decision on technology selection for my wannabe ISV by end-of-day today.  Well the time has come and I have to make a decision.  In a perfect world I'd have more time to do research and play with things but it's time to get a move on and start slinging some code.  After much deliberation I've decided to go with Ruby on Rails.  The two main contenders were really just dotNet or RoR.  There were plenty of reasons to go with either one, but in the end it came down to a few things.
I've been playing with Rails for the last week and working my way through Agile Web Development with Rails.  So far I'm very impressed.  Rails seems uniquely focused on the type of application that I want to deliver.  The other reason is not technical at all, but cultural.  I love the culture that surrounds Rails and it's just the kind of thing I want to be involved with.  In the movie "Tucker: The Man and His Dream" Martin Landau has a line that goes something like "Never get too close to anyone. You'll catch their dreams".  Well it seems that passion, like a dream, is quite contagious.  I'm catching the passion that the RoR crowd has and it's part of the reason I'm going with Rails for this venture.
The Style Czar is psyched while The Adept is wary about having to pick up a new language.  Only time will tell how this decision works out, but for the moment I'm happy to have this decision out of the way so we can focus on learning Rails and how to build out The Product Idea with it.

Comments

[Dema]

Hi Paul,

Nice choice. Welcome aboard.

For the best Ruby IDE you can get for Windows, try ArachnoRuby:
http://www.ruby-ide.com/

I tested it, bought it, and I am very satisfied.

[Paul Dix]

I've mostly been using Arachno for the last week. Initially I tried out SciTE, Eclipse, UltraEdit then Arachno.
I had some problems with the autoindentation not working properly. Also, not sure how well it plays with rails as far as using Arachno's debugger. I noticed that a new post was put up last week in their support forums about doing Rails development with Arachno, but I haven't had time to run through it yet.
This week I'm going to be giving jEdit a spin. If you have any good resources you can point me to about Rails development with Arachno, I'd love to have a look.

[Brian]

Good luck Paul! And good choice. I'm a MCSD for .NET and (day-job) .NET developer, and made the decision to develop all new web apps in Rails about a month ago, and not looking back one bit. Took me a while to go from such a robust IDE like Visual Studio to using just SciTE, but I'm getting used to it.