I chose RoR because designed with the programmer in mind – it’s extremely powerful, but it makes no apologies for those who do not understand the fundamentals of distributed web application development, automated builds, and test-driven development. I feel that the learning curve has been relatively steep, more on the web app side than anything else. That said, as someone with a strong Java background, I like the evolutionary step that Ruby has taken and feel comfortable with the tools – Rake vs. Ant, Test::Unit instead of JUnit, etc.

I’m reading a book called Rails for Java Developers and I highly recommend it if you are a Java developer and want to learn RoR – relevant, concise, with an excellent comparison between Java and RoR approaches.