Yeah my fault on shooting at just Rails, rather it needs to be directed at learning Ruby. No single framework will completely build the next great web app.

Agreed, no one can just learn Rails tomorrow and be hired on at a major company as the lead developer for Rails. You make an excellent point I neglected to make, get involved with the community and learn your craft through fixing bugs and intimately getting to know the language. As goes for any language you want to be seen as the master of.

I actually read shortly after writing this post about Twitter not being solely on Rails anymore.

Thanks for the helpful offer. So far Rails has been fun to develop in.

I can tune a PHP server to vastly outperform Rails apps. I can also set up a Rails application to bury a PHP application in terms of speed and scalability. However, it takes a lot of knowledge for *both* of those. Simply using Rails is not going to be faster than PHP if you don't have it working right. However, you will get your project done faster. There's no question there. By the time you have your php app talking to the database and displaying records, I'll be done with my first feature implementation.

To point #2, resume boster… everyone claims to be “competent” or “familiar with” whatever's popular. You want Rails to help you get a job? Learn Ruby, submit patches, become known on the net as someone who does Rails. Nobody's gonna hire you (for a good job) for just putting it on your resume. Same goes for PHP, Python, and even Javascript.

#3 Twitter uses a lot of stuff, including Rails, but also Scala, because Rails couldn't handle the demands of their message queue. Rails wasn't meant to be used the way they were using it. That's not Rails' fault, and so they did the smart thing and used a technology that *could* do what they wanted. Hulu uses Rails, but they also use Flash, and I am sure they have other technologies they use to get those videos to your machine.

#4 and #5 are great reasons to learn Rails. We do have a great community, and if you ever need help with anything Rails-related, just let me know and I'll see how I can help. If you're building a web-based app today, you're gonna have a hard time beating Rails for quickly getting your idea implemented. Deploying isn't even that hard anymore. But just remember, it's not a golden hammer, and it's not going to get you the most awesome jobs.