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If you haven't heard of Ruby or Rails before, I highly recommend checking out both of them. Ruby is a programming language that actually makes the end-to-end development of a system fun, and Rails is a superbly designed framework for developing web applications with Ruby.

I only have one complaint about Ruby—there is no way to distribute compiled Ruby code. In order to distribute a program written in Ruby, you have to give away the source code. This may inhibit its adoption in creating commercial applications. In fact, it was because of this fact that I stopped development on a least one project that I had started using Rails to implement. Instead, I decided to try to mimick the functionality of Rails using PHP5. Let's just say that endeavor isn't going so well.

It's not that it would be impossible to reimpliment much (although not all) of Rails' functionality in PHP; it's just a real burden to do so. Ruby and PHP—even with the improved Object Oriented features of PHP5—follow abjectly dissonant paradigms. Ruby just makes most programming tasks easier.

So I'm back to using Rails. Even for the application I stopped development on earlier. I decided that I'd rather give up the ability to distribute the code—relying instead on an ASP delivery model—than have to give up using Rails for its development. Yes, Rails is that good.

This also means that I'm going to be implementing this site with Rails, too. You might not see any changes here for a little while, because I'm getting the basics running on a development server. However, I think that overall progress here will be much faster using Rails than with the current PHP scripts.