What I like about Ruby On the Rails?

I came to know about Rails framework and Ruby language when Martin Fowler mentioned about Rake (sometime during Aug 2005)

I was in a state of denial for more than 6 months because I felt that Java is good enough to do anything serious or silly on most of the platforms. But I could not resist to see what is there in RoR and why such a vibrant community is building up.

I promptly downloaded InstantRails, RadRails Eclipse plugin and started playing with it.I found that Ruby is a wonderful language. Notation is simple enough to be understood and it is a very natural language. I felt like communicating with the computer in a very natural way. Keeping the language aside, I see the real power comes from Rails framework. It is a classic MVC framework and combined with smart domain objects (or ActiveRecords) Check MartinFowlers Pattern and a variety of generators.

Some of the cons of RoR is lack of support for Sybase Database Drivers. Sybase in spite of low market share, has a significant presence in market. I am checking RubyForge (Kind of SourceForge for Ruby) for other useful frameworks.

Overall it is an interesting alternative. I will explore more...