RE: Ruby on Rails?

Thanks for the responses from everyone.  There's been so much hype over RoR
that it piqued my interest, but when I hear "it's 10x more productive than
Java!@$!@#$!" I assume that what that really means is that the person who's
just started out with RoR was suffering through Struts and EJB and all that
other junk so I tend to discount it.  I figured I'd get a more accurate
assessment from a group of people who know what a real application framework
is supposed to do (i.e.: you guys). 

It's kind of tragic that 10 years later there's still nothing else out there
that quite compares to WebObjects (although I've heard good things about
Tapestry and Cayenne).  I'm pretty busy right now working on a smallish
WebObjects project but once I finish it in the next month or so I'll probaby
dive into Rails and see what the fuss is about.

One thing I'll add is that while I'm a big fan of dynamic languages and
metaprogramming (aspects, multimethods, open implementations, etc.), I
already fucking hate the Ruby syntax.  Given that it claims to have derived
from Smalltalk, I don't understand how they missed one of my favorite
contributions of Smalltalk to programming languages: named arguments.

The Ruby enthusiasts seem to have made a fetish of "terseness", which (IMHO)
they falsely believe is a significant boost to productivity.  Given that any
line of code is going to be *read* far more often than it's going to be
written, it seems like the pride they seem to take in having dispensed with
curly brackets and semicolons is misplaced.  I find this especially annoying
as I've lately been quite pleased to see that some of other languages that
have recently been written for the JVM (Nice, Groovy, etc.) have added some
great language features while fixing the main thing that I don't like about
Java's syntax: the lack of named arguments.  Oh well, you can't have
everything.

Bruce