rails is pretty sick
I just watched this intro video:
http://www.rubyonrails.org/media/video/rails_take2_with_sound.mov
I have to say that it's pretty cool stuff. I don't give 2 hoots about OO, AJAX, or any of that other fancy geek stuff Rails brings to the table. What really makes me excited is one thing. The ability to remove all the redundancy from your applications. The way it integrates with the database is fantastic. While I realize this must be a good bit slower than more traditional methods in today's world that little bit of speed loss is easily compensated for and well worth what must be a massive increase in overall productivity.
Also they got templating right by just using Ruby in the templates rather than pretending a templating language would be simpler.
Ruby is still way to under-deployed for building "for sale" apps like the one I'm working on, but it seems like an excellent solution for hosted apps as well as internal apps. I'm probably going to try and use it for some of the backend functionality I'll need to support HelpSpot, like license tracking, customer information, etc.